For just a moment, he wanted to be left alone. Drifting across the water with such beautiful scenery should have been relaxing except his phone kept ringing. He had tried once, leaving his phone at home or at least, turning it off. The amount of rage that came down on Read more…
If only magic was real. It’s not but I can give my characters the powers I want. You can make a fantasy world without magic but I find it more fun to include it. Usually, I go into a story already knowing what kind of powers I want to give Read more…
Your characters are on an adventure or simply walking around town. They encounter a foreigner with a heavy accent, speaking a language they don’t understand. Maybe they do understand. Or maybe, your characters never encounter foreigners. It’s your story. You could create a world where everyone speaks the same language. Read more…
Fantasy novels are often set in a Medieval Europe-inspired location. Even I tend to default to that location because I come across that more often when reading fantasy or even watching fantasy movies. I need to read more fantasy book set in non-Western locations. Months ago, I read Children of Blood and Read more…
You’re in a new place, exploring it, taking 100s of photos. At the end of the day, you look over the photo and delete ones that don’t work. World builders, you might want to think a bit before you delete those bad photos. It’s like when you’ve written a terrible Read more…
If you’re writing a post-apocalyptic story or a tale set in the Middle Ages, you might’ve found yourself doing some plant research. The Sciell’s Legacy: Book 4 of The Merging Worlds Series involves this kind of research. In The Lost Sciell: Book 3, we see the world slowly crumbling as war begins. In The Read more…
A couple of years ago, I was walking to the library with A Little Faster by There For Tomorrow playing on my device. Suddenly, I’m picturing a character, Josephine Royal, from my Merging Worlds series. Her power, her Lifeblood. lights her body on fire. I realized that form (lighting her Read more…
I like elves, fairies and dwarfs but I’ll sometimes roll my eyes when they show up in a story. It’s more interesting when an author creates their own race, calling it something new. My story, The Marked Hosts, has dragon shifters but they’re called Sencial. The Del’Praeli in my Merging Worlds series Read more…
Five characters in my Merging Worlds series, all children, find themselves on a ship- transported there by the enemy. Now, I need to realistically write their experience. I’ve been on the water a couple of times. Once, I was on a cruise ship in the middle of a storm. That Read more…
What do you do when you’re struggling to name something in your fantasy or sci-fi novel? I’m running out of names. I have a list in Evernote but I’ve used most of them. Some of the ways I created names in the past don’t work anymore. With 12 stories I was bound Read more…