Deborah Kelty is a Christian writer based in Wales (how awesome is that?). She recently tagged me for the “When You Learn More About me” Writer’s Questionnaire, an honor I am axcited to participate in (mostly because that saves me from having to come up with a blog post topic for Tuesday, I’ll be honest with you).
The Google dictionary defines the fantasy genre as “a genre of imaginative fiction involving magic and adventure, especially in a setting other than the real world.” With fantasy, you have freedom. You can make whatever you want possible. You can create your own worlds, your own species, your own rules and laws. And yet, fantasy does have its stereotypes. And that’s okay. I find a lot of similarities between my writing and many other fantasy books I’ve read. Tropes aren’t necessarily a bad thing, unless you’re relying on them in an attempt to box your story into a particular genre. If you’re a fantasy writer who’s struggling with eliminating stereotypes, or if you’re any kind of author who wants a fun and slightly sarcastic post to read, you may benefit from the following tropes and the possible alternatives for each.
Hey look! The wonderful Hannah Krynicki tagged me in her post for the Liebster Award. She’s an awesome person and writer with brilliant ideas and thoughts, so please, check out her blog and give her a follow. Thanks Hannah!
So, tags have rules. I need to answer 11 questions, list 11 random facts, tag 11 people and give them 11 questions to answer. You’d think the person who created this tag really liked the number 11. Now, on to those questions from Hannah.
Things have shifted crazily with writing this past year. As most of you know, my NaNoWriMo 2016 novel Fiction’s Lie is on the way to indie publication through Amazon’s Createspace, but there’s a lot of other projects going on as we speak I type. I’ve developed new worlds and characters, rewrote some fanfiction, stressed out over Camp NaNoWriMo, and jumped back into my main project, Netherworld.
As indie publication looms brightly on the horizon, I’ve started getting a little frightened with the fact that pretty soon, I’m going to have to put together deadlines and release dates and post schedules for marketing. Which means lots of organization and planning, which is why I aspire to be a time lord or invent a way to create clones of myself. If only, right?
So, without further ado, here are some highlights of my writing world, as well as a very exciting announcement. The announcement? *accentuated advertiser’s voice* Read more to find out. (Or look at the blog post’s title.)
If you’ve been following my blog for a good while, you may have noticed that I like to talk a lot about listening to film scores while writing and how the emotions composed specifically for movie scenes could also be used while writing similar scenes in your story. Up until a few days ago, however, I had no idea that fantasy ambience/white noise existed, and when I did, I set out to find some of the best background noises that could be used for the appropriate scenes.
The amount of time that has passed since I last wrote a blog post didn’t really hit me until I noticed the age of my featured post. Now, (a month and a half later) I decided to get my act together and delve back into the groove of posting on the blog weekly. Starting with something that I feel very strongly about: Plot bunnies.
Plot bunnies. They seem really cute and soft and loveable at first, but they turn out to be much more ferocious than they seemed. As a writer, I’ve learned how to encounter plot bunnies, tame them, and save them for later when the time is right. Name a writer who never struggled with plot bunnies. Hard, eh?
Some of you might be wondering why I’ve decided to write a post for writers on how to stay healthy. I realize that nearly everyone knows basic guidelines for staying healthy (it’s mostly just a matter of ignoring temptation), so why can’t writers just do the same thing? Glad you asked! I am armed and ready with an answer to this question.
If you’re a writer, or know writers, you’ll understand that such a life is very sedentary. We read, write, edit, brainstorm, and do everything else writing related while sitting down and/or hunched over a notebook or screen. This is because everything we do writing related, whether getting inspiration or actually doing the art, either comes from or goes on a piece of paper or a blank document. To sum it up, writing is definitely not an active activity, if you haven’t already noticed.
