Q&A covering workflow, contests, lantern-hanging, word counts, and more
Fifteen minutes long, because you're in a hurry, and we're not that smart.
How do you give a personality to the animal or animals in your story? How do you do it without being a crazy cat lady?
Brandon, Dan, Mary, and Howard each take a look at some changing aspect of the industry, and how they’re reacting to that change.
How is “Men in Black” like “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter?” This week on Writing Excuses we talk about Secret History, and how to do it well.
What are the things that matter to your characters? What things matter to your readers? After we get the obligatory ambiguity out of the way, we settle into talking about the “stakes” and the escalation thereof.
Maurice Broaddus joins us to talk about “writing the other” — writing other cultures, races, genders — basically anybody who isn’t much like you.
The crew fields questions about criticism, suspension of disbelief, tension, and more.
Brandon, Dan, Mary, and Howard field questions from Twitter, including what to do if you don’t like your characters, keeping your plot on track, and how grounded in real geography your urban fantasy should be. There is also a question about bacon.
Brandon, Dan, Mary, and Howard talk about Historical Fantasy (differentiating it from Alternate History), its popularity, and how you might go about beginning to write it.
Brandon, Dan, Mary, and Howard brainstorm some fantasy setting elements for you. Need a magic system on the cheap? How about a political power structure?