Building worlds and selling them. Working fantasy authors on collaboration, output, marketing, and the realities of a long career in the genre.
ADHDRichard Lowe's fourth regular appearance on The Impossible Puzzles Show with Mike Merkur: living with ADHD and autism unmedicated, why a year in the bank is the way out of a job you hate, face blindness and rejection sensitive dysphoria,…
1930sRobert E. Howard was born on January 22, 1906, and sold his first story to Weird Tales at eighteen. In ten working years he wrote boxing yarns, westerns, horror and the Conan stories, then died at thirty in Cross Plains,…
Children's BooksHarry Potter and J.K. Rowling share a July 31 birthday. The first book was turned down by publisher after publisher, launched with 500 hardbacks, and went on to sell more than 600 million copies. The story behind it is a…
Children's BooksOn July 4, 1862, an Oxford mathematics lecturer rowed three sisters up the Thames and made up a story to pass the afternoon. One of them asked him to write it down. Alice's Day marks that trip, and the road…
Character DevelopmentMatt Damon's Loki ended up floating in the Mediterranean. The original ended up chained in a cave until the end of the world. How the trickster of Norse myth turned into Wagner's fire god, Marvel's adopted brother and Kevin Smith's…
Fantasy FictionEvery Ray Harryhausen film reviewed on this site, ranked. The skeleton duel, the cyclops, the Medusa and the giant creatures that an entire generation of directors grew up wanting to make.
Fantasy FictionLe Guin grew up in a house of anthropologists and applied their central question to places that did not exist: not what a society has, but why it arranged itself that way. That order of operations is why her worlds…
FaithLewis was an Oxford medievalist who became an unlikely broadcaster, wrote seven children's books in seven years, and produced a book about grief so raw he published it under a false name. His thirty-year argument with Tolkien about worldbuilding is…
AprilPratchett left school at seventeen, spent seven years as press officer for four nuclear power stations, and wrote forty-one Discworld novels that made him the best-selling author in Britain. He was dismissed as a comic fantasy writer for most of…
Book ReviewsMost fantasy writers grab the movie version of a creature and run with it, which means they're usually working from a film made fifty years after the creature existed. This book shows you the gap between what a thing was…
Fantasy FictionFantasy has to be wondrous and believable at once. Chase only wonder and the world collapses at the first hard question; chase only logic and nobody feels
Fantasy FictionSpeculative romance is not ordinary romance with special effects. It works when the supernatural or futuristic element amplifies a character's psychology
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