Worldbuilding is a key component to fiction writing, but to what extent you construct your fictional world can vary greatly. Some stories are set in exotic fantasy locales with thousands of years of history, fully mapped geography, and unique languages. Others are relatively contemporary settings with just a few “changes” to explain to readers. All more »
Earlier this week Brayden Hirsch posted a nice article titled What Makes a Bad Guy Bad that got me thinking again about the villain’s role in a story. I come back to this topic now and then as I think the best of heroes are defined by their villains, but I don’t feel the inverse more »
The second part of this series on science fiction technology is about energy fields. Manipulated energy in one form or another has been a catch-all plot device in scifi for decades. It especially serves as stand-in solution whenever a more solid explanation of the action is unavailable. Science continues to advance with science fiction in more »
As a follow-up to my earlier post last month, Scifi for Summer Reading, here are three more great titles to consider as the warm season continues: Robert J. Sawyer’s WWW: Wake tells the contemporary story of teenager Caitlin, born blind but possessing a keen intellect. After receiving an experimental implant she gains the ability to more »
We live in exciting times. It seems almost every day I read another article covering a breakthrough in science and technology, and often those innovations are direct result of ideas dreamed up in science fiction many years prior. I’ve collected some of those stores in a nine-part series on the science fiction technology of today more »
I’ve now restored much of my old content to the Projects section that had been pulled with the WordPress 3.0 update. The always-popular Map of the Known World from Martin’s wonderful A Song of Ice and Fire series is of course reposted, and I’ve linked up my web applications at SourceForge for those who may more »
UPDATE: I’ve added the chat hashtags: #writersmovement #fridayflash #5MinuteFiction, and created a separate section for general unscheduled chats where I’ve included other common writing tags. There are a wide variety of chat groups active on Twitter, and you can use the social tool to easily meet and get to know others with similar interests, share more »
