New Character Page!

  For the last few weeks, I've been interviewing a few of my characters and now, for ease of access, I've built a little home for them. You can find all my interviews, plus heaps of photos from my pinterest boards HERE.

The Beauty of Success

This week, I have made some serious progress on my ROW80 goals and I am quite pleased. Even though I didn't finish all of them, I've managed to lever myself out of the rut that I've been in re: reading and writing and editing and life. My goals for ROW80 are: read a book a fortnight blog …

The Promised Post – Language in Fiction

Since I returned from my hiatus a few months ago, I have been meaning to do a post on language creation. This is it. Or more excitingly, the first in a series of language posts. Today I'm going to talk about my process and my opinion on language creation in fiction. If there are other …

A Journey Through Time

Last Friday I opened WordPress to check and reply to the comments and found a surprise waiting for in the notifications bar - a trophy and a congratulatory message on two years of this blog. Two years is a long time and I have trouble believing it is that long because it feels to me …

A Legend Reborn: How Stephen Lawhead Reinvented Arthurian Legend

Taliesin, the first book in prolific author Stephen Lawhead's  Pendragon Cycle begins years before the more familiar time of Arthur. It also manages to combine two of my favourite things: Greek style mythology and Celtic mythology. How, you wonder? That you'll have to find out for yourself but odd as it sounds, Lawhead manages to …

My experiences in building a fantasy language.

Okay, the long awaited for (I hope) post on the language I created for my world, or more precisely, one of the countries in it. I will warn you, as much as I’ll try to keep it interesting and un-technical, this may be a little dry. It evolved from a single phrase which came to …

The Language Instinct, Part 2.

Today, we continue with my worldbuilding series and the topic of the moment, language. Last post I talked about research. Today's post will cover structure and variation. Structure (or syntax, if you want to get fancy) can vary from language to language. It is easy to fall into the Subject-Verb-Object trap when creating a language …

The Language Instinct, Part 1.

So this is the first of my worldbuilding posts which are specifically geared at writers of fantasy however I hope the information can be useful to others as well. Words. Language. The precious nectar of civilisation; the ambrosia of sanity and insanity both. Without words, we are nothing. With words, we can be anything. As …

Parlez-vous francais?

First thing you need to know - this post has almost nothing to do with French, despite any misconceptions the title might give. The second thing you need to know (there will be a test :P) is this post is the second in my world-building series (if you can really call it that). The third …

What’s in a name?

Once again, I am speaking to you from the past. Oooooo. I have exams at the moment and therefore blogging is most definitely secondary. Good thing I planned ahead. I've decided to start interspersing in some posts about world building, character development etc, based on things I've learnt along the way, to help you out …