worldbuilding

Reality Check

December 7, 2009

Incorporating real live people or historical figures (real dead people) in your fiction is a decision that should be approached with thought and care. I wouldn’t say I’m not in favor of it, but I’m wary of it. It’s one of those things that’s very difficult to do well, and often it doesn’t need to [...]

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Personal Taste

August 17, 2009

I found myself mentioning frequently at Anticipation that I work with an imprint (Dragon Moon Press) that specializes in “science fiction, fantasy and ‘gentle horror’.”  To the world at large, this seems like a small range, but within the narrower bounds of f/sf, it’s actually quite broad. I found that a lot of people asked [...]

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Perspectives on Prologues

April 30, 2009

Prologues are tricky creatures. I’ve been asked about them several times lately, so I thought I’d pool the resources and advice I’ve found all in one convenient place. Suspense writer Brandilyn Collins has some great advice on prologues: If you think you need a prologue in order to get your story moving, don’t use one. [...]

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Challenging the “future”

March 16, 2009

In one of my posts a while back, I said that when you build your world and your setting, you need to keep your technology consistent or keep it plausible. It doesn’t have to be both, but it must be one or the other. In science fiction, it’s most common for writers to adopt metric [...]

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Speedbumps and the Suspension of Disbelief

August 25, 2008

An important consideration in any work of fiction is the world in which your work will be set. As essential to a story as plot and characters, setting is rarely what makes a book, but it can be what breaks it. Suspension of disbelief is a tricky thing because it varies from reader to reader. [...]

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