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Ready to Submit? Check again…
After taking on the job of editor and the task of assessing submissions, I am finding a disturbing number of unpolished manuscripts crossing my desk. Therefore, I hope you can help me list a few of the simple problems we, as authors, can ‘fix’ before we submit our work to an acquisition editor. When polishing [...]
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Fantasy-Faction Milestone
So, initially this started out as a forum private message to a blogger who asked: “How did Fantasy-Faction get so big?” I started typing, but in the end I decided to put it on the main page as I think that ‘you’, yes ‘you’, the person reading this piece right now deserves to know how [...]
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Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser by Fritz Leiber
It’s generally accepted that, though there were precursors, the sword and sorcery genre was created in the 1920s and 1930s by Robert E. Howard, with his stories of Conan and Kull. The phrase, however, was never used by Howard; it was coined many years after his death, in 1961, by arguably one of the best [...]
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Frodor’s Travel Guide: The “Bad Economy” Issue
This month’s travel guide is based on Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn Trilogy. More information on the series can be found at brandonsanderson.com. You can also read Fantasy-Faction’s review of the first Mistborn novel here. Welcome After a long dormancy spent weathering the economy, Frodor’s is back and better than ever! Don’t make that face, we know you [...]
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Arsenic and Old Leaves: The Art of Poisoning Your Fantasy Characters – Part 1
So, you’re contemplating murder. Er, that is, your character is contemplating murder. Effective modes of death and all that. Bloodless versus bloodbath, public duel versus private confrontation, “accident” versus spontaneous sword through the gut. That’s all well and good, sure…but have you considered poison? In the Middle Ages, poison was a highly popular means of [...]
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Return of the Novella: Ebooks and the Awkwardly Sized Novel
Novelettes and novellas are two categories that, together, encompass the gap of awkward sized stories – between 7500 and 70,000 words (according to SFWA). Many classics are included under these twin umbrellas, but I’d like you to ask yourself a question: when did you last read one? For most of us, that will entail some [...]
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