WIP Story development, part 2

Last week, I talked about getting my plot outline up to a sketchy 1200 words. Usually, my plot outlines start off fairly specific (“Kayla is in the library with Harkawn, reviewing past Dark Lord grimoires. She is annoyed – what good is summoning a horde of mosquitoes?

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Literary Prophecies

Prophecies seem to have become a staple of fantasy literature. Most of them are either self-fulfilling prophecies, where the characters’ attempts to circumvent the prophecy are what makes it come true, or they are riddles – symbolic language or plays on words that are puzzles for the

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Three problems in dialog

First, a public service announcement: the Worldshaper’s podcast which did an interview with me a few months back is running a Kickstarter to fund an anthology of short fiction by authors they’ve interviewed. The URL is https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/edwardwillett/shapers-of-worlds-volume-ii The authors involved will be people who  were interviewed in

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Characters and plans

“No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” – Helmuth von Moltk People in general do not do things completely at random. There may not be much conscious, deliberate planning involved in stumbling out of bed in the morning and getting the coffee or tea started, but

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