Achillean Romance with Fangs
While I have a book published (siren! pirates! okay yeah enough with the marketing), I’m still editing the first novel I wrote. It’s okay if your first novel takes a long time. It’s okay if you have to rewrite it and rewrite it and then thoroughly edit it and then rewrite it again. It’s okay if you take long breaks from […]
These types of relationships can be some of the most interesting and enjoyable, both to read and write, because they show us many sides of the same characters and the growth from a hatred to mixed feelings and finally to genuine love and acceptance is often heartwarming to experience. But relationships like also require finesse to […]
I’m incredibly disappointed with the trend in stories (especially ‘edgy’ YA novels) to bombard the reader with traumatic situations, angry characters, and relationship drama without ever first giving them a reason to root for a better future. As a reader… I might care that the main siblings are fighting if they had first been shown […]
What is a redemption arc? “Redemption: An act of redeeming or atoning for a fault or mistake.” An act, implying action, which is created by choices, which just happens to be the basis of character development. Some writers confuse redemption arcs with things they are not, and end up creating situations which aren’t redemption arcs at all, but […]
Most of us are quite familiar with the term, but if you’ve heard it passed around without a proper definition, a Mary Sue is a (traditionally female) character who’s known for being flawless. She’s powerful, beautiful, intelligent, more skilled than her peers, gets herself out of every bad situation with ease, (usually wowing a crowd of bystanders in the […]
What is negative character development? It’s incredibly hard to define. Some writers relate it to moral decline. Some apply it to areas where a character returns to a way of life they had at one point developed out of. Other writers don’t like to use the term at all. There’s another way to look at […]
Who would win in a fight: Dejean or Ilya? Jillian asked this a while back, and I couldn’t help but go into a little too much detail… Ilya, from The Warlord Contracts, isn’t the most technical fighter, but he cheats like nobody’s business. Dejean, from Pearl, is pretty clever when he wants to be though, and it doesn’t […]
(Tips to help you tackle the outdoors without ever leaving your home.) The forest for the trees. When describing any setting, especially potentially spacious settings such as expanses of nature, you have two major components: the big picture (the forest) and the little picture (the trees). It’s generally best to start with one and move […]
Before we get started, I want to clarify two things: – Antagonists can be of any moral alignment. They can be also be non-human things, such as monsters, nature, inner demons, etc. The antagonist is simply the primary thing your protagonist fights against. – For the course of this article I will be talking about […]
“An estranged princess and an ex-slave. What a funny pair we make.” Mercenary partners Dlan and Ashalle escaped the pain of their past lives to find relative peace with one of the last free galaxies of the Bijou Cluster. Hunting smugglers and terrorist holds its dangers, but it pays well and the perks are good: a […]
