Time for another attempt by me to ramble on randomly about fantasy and see what falls out. No planning for this blog. I should be in bed already! If you don't have time, the title sums it up and you can stop here! (Added this line in last, haha!) When I consider characters, dilemmas, conflicts, …
Category: World Building
Why I Write Fantasy: The Three Fours #2: Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Oh yeah. The music, the costumes, the saturated colours, the visual style that played with realism and then deliriously ignored it to tell its story in its own defiant way, and managed to sweep me up in it. I watched this movie four times in a rather dilapidated cinema in Dundee, complete with decayed but …
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Why I Write Fantasy: The Three Fours #1: Highlander
Spoilers for a 30+ year old movie follow. And for Alien3 too. You've been warned. There are only three movies I’ve paid to see more than once in rapid succession, and each time I ended up seeing the film four times in the theatre. In each case I was lured into the atmosphere of the …
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Why I Write Fantasy: To Write the Classic Non-Human Races, in Other Books, Later
In the fantasy of my youth non-human races were always part of the magical formula that took me from the mundane here, to the fantastical there. Talking animals, creatures from greek myth, folklore figures brought to life, all of them were part of that secret world just around the corner and over the hill …
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Why I Write Fantasy: Morality, Culture, and Character Creation
So folks, while it is fresh in my mind I thought I’d reiterate what I thought was one of the central points discussed during our panel at Denver Comic Con. (Thank you once again to my fab panelists!) And that is this: I feel that paying attention to the culture a character grows up in, …
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The Writing Life: Go Team!
Now I've done a blog before about how it takes a team, but tonight I'm just saying, for the last time, that I and my companions on the panel will be at Denver Comic Con tomorrow at 12 midday, room 404, discussing Morality and Culture in Fantasy Fiction: a look at how grounding characters in …
Why I Write Fantasy: To Connect the Dots…
Last week I talked about how sometimes ideas assail me, story concepts or character ideas that want to make the difficult transition from idle fancy to fully-fleshed reality. It is really easy to just daydream the good bits: the dramatic confrontations, the epic climaxes, awful betrayals, heartbreaking deaths, hard-earned victories. And any amount of acid-tongued …
The Writing Life: Finding Yourself Involved in a Comic Con
So a while ago you will recall I chatted on Jesper Schmidt’s YouTube channel about Morality in World building. See it here, if you missed it! My blog series on morality in fantasy starts here. Well, he mentioned that it was not a topic he’d ever come across when discussing fantasy fiction before, so I …
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Why I Write Fantasy: The Recurring Ideas That Won’t Let Go
I write fantasy stories because ideas for them keep popping into my head, almost always when I am in no position to write them down or record them. Life’s ironic like that. When I’m half-awake is a classic, that’s when ideas for dramatic situations come to me, cliffhangers without the set up that my still …
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Why I Write Fantasy: A Question of Morality, Part 4: A Clash of Codes
You can check out earlier discussions of morality in fantasy writing here, here, and here. This one goes long, as I felt the need for examples to make sense of what I was saying, so saddle up! This week let’s talk about something a little tricky – the minefield where morality and ethics meet, because …
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Roderick T. Macdonald 