I just wanted to do a short post this week to mention that I recently became a staff writer for Fantasy Faction, so in addition to keeping up this weekly Thoughts on Fantasy blog (or at least, I usually manage to keep it weekly!) I’ll be writing one or two articles a month for Fantasy Faction. Continue reading
About four or so years ago, I read a large number of “how to” books about creative writing. I read them because I was a new writer wanting to hone my craft, but also because I was writing my master’s thesis at the time. It involved analysing existing writing advice about world-building… in short, seeing what other writers had to say about inventing and describing fictional settings. Some of the books I read were very useful, others not so much.
It’s 2016!! And to celebrate in proper fantasy-nerd style, I’m doing my annual round up of the best fantasy and science fiction books I read last year. These are not books published in 2015, just books I happened to read last year, thus you’ll notice some are ones I took a bit longer to discover than other people might have. Continue reading
If you’re wandering through a store or scanning a website, it’s generally easy to recognise a fantasy novel. Most covers have features and styles that make them unmistakable. In fact, fantasy and science fiction novels have a history of standing out… and not always in a positive way. They are famous for their gaudy, bizarre and sometimes downright ugly cover art – there’s even a website dedicated to collecting the worst sci-fi and fantasy book covers. Continue reading
Okay, so I’ll get it out there first off: I love Goodreads. I am a Goodreads fangirl. Excepting perhaps Facebook, Goodreads is my favourite social media network. Like so many book-related things these days, it is owned by Amazon (sigh)… but I overlook that because it has instigated such a positive change in my reading life and behaviour.
If you’ve never tried it, and one (or all) of the below statements applies to you, there’s a good chance you’d enjoy using it too: Continue reading
I’ve just returned from a round-the-world trip, and all that globe-encircling got me to thinking about the shape of worlds in epic fantasy novels. This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed it, but there’s a rather bizarre and archaic trait almost all fantasy worlds have in common: Continue reading
If you read a lot in the genre, recognising a book or film as “fantasy fiction” is probably something innate and automatic. However, if you’re not familiar with it, or if you’ve wondered where the lines are drawn, a definition might help to clarify things.
But how do you define something as slippery and changeable as a genre? Continue reading
Anyone who reads regularly will be familiar with that feeling of struggling through the first pages or chapters of a book, pushing on because you’re waiting to see if it will get interesting. At some point the book either gets better and grabs your interest, or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, you have two options:
1) force yourself to read a whole book you’re not enjoying, or
2) give up and start a different book.
Believe it or not, when I was younger I always selected option 1. Continue reading
When I was 12 years old, my godfather gifted me a book. It looked terribly uninteresting. The title – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – evoked memories of Oliver Twist, a story I had never much liked. The cover – a black and white photo of a steam train – looked even drearier. I imagined it would be an autobiography of a poor English boy living near train tracks, or on a train. Boring.
Despite my godfather’s assurances it was “becoming quite popular in Europe” and that his children had liked it, I resolved not to read it. Continue reading
For me, happy endings have always been one of the biggest draw cards of fantasy fiction. However, I didn’t really place any significance on them till I was listening to a TED talk about gaming.
In this TED talk, game designer and researcher Jane McGonigal discusses the countless hours that are invested by humanity worldwide in playing video games every week. Continue reading
