Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! A quick word about travel. In fantasy novels travel is a hard one to manage. As a writer you find yourself researching how fast and how far someone can walk, how far a horse can carry a character, and how they were used historically (hint: galloping for long …
Category: Travel
The Writing Life: Edinburgh Chip shops and fantasy city design, a diversion
Time Passes. Hello, friends and the occasional relative! I visited my home town of Edinburgh recently, and while much had stayed the same, a lot had changed. Profound, I know. So I’m going to talk about chip shops. First, I am convinced that if you want the real experience of fried fish in Scotland, don’t …
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Why I Write Fantasy: Inspirations – The Art of Fantasy, Part 1: Masters Old and New
So yes, now I’m dotting around. Last week I talked about a fragment of the music that inspires me, and began with that avatar of fantasy infused metal, Ronnie James Dio. I once wanted to design a tabletop roleplaying game campaign around a number of his songs. Maybe I’ll talk about that another time. This …
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Why I Write Fantasy: The Travel Begins at Home Edition
All writing, it seems to me, begins in your own head. Sometimes it will be written as a strong spontaneous reaction to outside stimulus – protest songs, polemical essays, critical feuds, a satirical impulse to start telling a particular story in order to hit a particular target, but for me, the story starts as a …
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The Writing Life: Travel as Inspiration
For a long time I did not travel. My memories of flight were fuzzy – laying my jacket down on the floor and sleeping between the seats on a flight across the Atlantic in 1974. The weird sensation of the ground I walked on not being solid, the vague bounce I had never previously experienced …
Roderick T. Macdonald 