The 2024 World Fantasy Awards, held at the World Fantasy Convention in Niagara Falls, honored some exceptional works. Best Novel Best Novella Best Short Fiction Best Anthology Best Collection Best Artist Special Award – Professional Special Award – Non-Professional This year’s judges were Douglas A. Anderson, Stephanie Feldman, Pat Murphy, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, and Angela […]
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The vast majority of my readers keep up with my news via the email list, so for a while I thought I would just let the blog sit where it was, with a run of interesting posts. However, I’ve been to author sites where the last blog post was two years ago and got the
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There are many grand prix awards for fantasy writers, including the Aurealis Awards, the Australian grand prix awards for fantasy and science fiction, of which I am a finalist this year. There is also the Hugo and Nebula awards, and the Dragon Awards (with their lovely trophies). Most of the time, as readers, we’re not
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Atlas Obscura recently reported that some of the WWI battlegrounds in France, particularly around Verdun, still have great swathes of land, some of it larger than Paris itself, that are hostile to humans. World War I was the first modern war. Over a century later, we sometimes have trouble thinking of the Great War as
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It’s Star Wars Day, which times out nicely as my new post schedule is for Saturdays. Although you could be asking why a fantasy writer is talking about a science fiction franchise. I’m talking about it here because Star Wars is most often considered to be Science Fantasy these days, with its Force and other
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Read them right now, for free. Most casual readers of fantasy presume that J.R.R. Tolkien invented it. Not quite. Fantasy as an element of fiction has been around since history began, in all cultures and eras. The bible itself has fantastical stories, Greek myths are stuffed full of it, even The Arabian Nights tales are
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Unveiling the Tapestry Real-World History’s Impact on Fantasy Worldbuilding I’m a history nut. I don’t know if every fantasy author is also a history nut, but a love of history must surely become a facet of fantasy authors’ careers the longer they write fantasy. We all pull from history for our worldbuilding, after all. History
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Magic systems in fantasy often fall into two distinct categories: hard magic and soft magic. Each offers unique storytelling opportunities, although readers tend to gravitate towards one or the other. What is the allure of each? I know I lean heavily toward hard magic, myself. Magic as technology has a strong appeal for me. The
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Fantasy as a genre tends to run long. One hundred thousand words (400 pages) for a novel is average. But short fantasy: short stories, novellas and novelettes, are a specialized artistry for the fantasy author. The shorter stories have the same amount of world building as the longer novels, but you only glimpse it. It’s
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Authors can go to extraordinary lengths to build their fictional worlds. They have travelled the world, and spent decades in research. James Cameron has gone where few men have gone before–in ocean depths that few have ever seen. Based on his research he wrote The Abyss (one of my favourite movies ever) and Titanic. J.R.R. Tolkien invented
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