BattleCraft: Strategic Assessments

Military action is important to the nation—it is the ground of death and life, the path of survival and destruction, so it is imperative to examine it. –Master Sun

We’ve talked before about how when you write in a fantasy world it’s your job as the writer to literally re-create the real world, from the smallest details to the most imposing forces at work. Understanding the geography, the political situation, the people in any given district, and latest string of illness spreading through the city are all important, but so is understanding the military and peacekeeping forces.

There’s a difference between peacekeeping forces, like police, and military forces. Peacekeepers protect the people and the equilibrium of power at home, whereas military focuses on defending against the enemies of the state. As Admiral Adama (Battlestar Galactica) pointed out, when the military is used as peacekeepers, the enemy of the state tends to become the people. In a later post, we’ll look at developing police forces in a fantasy realm, but today let’s focus on the gist of constructing a military force.

How to Forge a Signature

Don’t get too excited. I’m not posting this to help you get out of showing your mom your report card or anything like that. This, and other articles to follow, are aimed at teaching myself, and you guys by proxy, how to take a more hands-on approach to the things we write about. The old adage “write what you know” is a solid one because you write more convincingly when you know what you’re about—and if you don’t know something, take that step and learn it.

Forging a signature is all about confidence, so says Neal Caffrey from USA Network’s White Collar,

How to Write Dreams

We all have dreams. Some leave us breathless with panic and others just puzzle the daylights out of our waking minds. Whether you believe they are a product of your subconscious brain or some kind of divination, no one can argue that they’re real enough while we’re in them. And so it should be for our characters are well. We want to write real people, so in addition to those personality quarks you’re working so hard on instilling, consider what’s happening in the background of each character’s life. I tend to use dreams as a foreshadowing tool, and there are times when they can play a larger role, such as in the hands of a shaman trained to dissect such things as signs from the gods.

• Be subtle

Don’t go dream happy unless it’s part of the plot that your character’s dreams play some role. Also don’t start the story off with a dream. That dramatic running-while-being-chased and then bolting upright in bed bit is overworked,

Live Life like a Tourist

I’m not being funny, although it does sound that way. I grew up in a tourist trap, an old, backwaters little town that was dependent on its tourist traffic and its distilleries, and even though we needed those out-of-towners to maintain the place, there was a certain lack of appreciation for them. To be a “tourist” carries a social stigma—they drive too slowly because they don’t know the roads, they stand and gawk at things that you pass by every day, they ask questions, just way too many questions. Locals might need tourists, but that doesn’t mean they have to like ‘em.

Turn that situation around though. There are benefits to being the tourist, not least of which is the mentality that you should experience life to the fullest because you’re on a timetable. Isn’t this true of life though, that we only have it for a limited amount of time? And yet that “time is precious” mentality isn’t something we take into consideration on a daily basis.

Thinking like a tourist teaches you to…

• Operate under a timetable (live like you were dying)

How to Maintain Originality and Creativity

NaNo always kicks my butt, and it always takes much longer to recover than I would like. Here we are, a month from  Nov. 30 and I’ve posted one little article. On the upside, I have been working on my manuscripts, but there’s always a balance that needs to be struck.

A while back, I stumbled across an interesting site that claimed to have THE exam any would-be fantasy writer should take before committing words to pages. The premise of the questions was that most writers (read: novices; read: all of us) only write with the intent of ripping off great minds like J.R.R Tolkien.

While the exam and intro were structured all wrong, the author does present a few interesting questions that any writer, regardless of genre or skill level, should be asking herself. We’re always struggling to come up with new material that will captivate readers and establish ourselves in the literary world. Creativity comes from within and without, but originality comes in part from knowing what and how something has been done before.

Firstly we must learn to…

The Write Before Christmas

Reblogged from :

Wouldn't it be great to have a jolly, old elf pop in and edit your manuscript for you?

A little holiday cheer, for all you writers out there:

The Write Before Christmas

‘Twas the cusp of the holidays

And all through the house

Not a creature was stirring

Not even her mouse

Her fingers hovered over the keyboard with care…

Read more… 567 more words

I'm not usually one for Christmas-themed things, but this little writer's version of an old classic was delightful to read - check it out!

Reflecting on Casualties of NaNo2012

I survived… but in terms of NaNo, I didn’t win. My anthology was a dragon that I fought with short sword and shield, rock and sling, bow and arrow, morning star and—well, you get the idea. It was brutal and bloody, but I knew it would be. We all know that going into it. Writing is damned hard work sometimes.