(I can’t help but wonder how many people are going to get that joke…)
So, here’s a question for you: Precisely when, and why, did polytheism become the default assumption for fantasy?
There’s nothing at all wrong with fantasy novels describing polytheistic cultures. A great number of my favorite fantasy series do, and indeed, most of my [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot about genre lately. Also talking a lot about genre; I touched on the line between sci-fi and fantasy here on Suvudu a few weeks ago, and I recently talked about the inextricable links between fantasy and horror in a guest post on Joshua Palmatier’s blog. And I’ve been talking about [...]

I have a really cool character.
No big deal, right? Every author has an entire list of cool characters, stories, settings, or what have you, only some of which he or she will ever actually get to writing.
This particular character, by the name of Lathaan (sometimes “Lathaan the Unholy”), is sort of my Conan. By this, [...]

Wizards of the Coast recently released Player’s Handbook 3 for the Dungeons & Dragons game. Among the various new goodies presented therein are some new playable races–including plant people called “wilden” and sentient crystalline creatures called “shardminds.”
And as is quite common when some of the game’s more “out-there” elements are introduced, the reception has been [...]

Forgive me if this is a little disjointed; I’m not so much trying to make a specific point here as I am just “talking out” a recent observation.
But have any of you consciously noticed that science-fiction lacks some of the basic tropes of fantasy? I don’t mean specific tropes–it goes without saying that sci-fi and [...]

Next weekend, I’m going to be attending Comicpalooza in Houston, Texas. (And I also probably won’t be posting a column next Saturday, for precisely that reason.) This is not, in and of itself, a new experience for me. That is, I’ve never been to Comicpalooza, but I’ve been to plenty of other conventions, enough that [...]

I’m sure most of you have heard the quote “Mediocre writers borrow; great writers steal.” I’ve seen it phrased a dozen different ways, and attributed to everyone from T. S. Eliot to Oscar Wilde to (in altered form) Pablo Picasso. I have no idea what the truth is, and the great thing about this being [...]