Recent content by Insolent Lad

You might want to take a look at the work of Thomas Burnett Swann, who wrote a number of popular novels in the Sixties and Seventies that combined historical figures with classical mythology. 'The Minikins of Yam' is set in just such an Egypt (and its boy Pharaoh hero is supposedly historical)...

Death and loss. A scene where we lose a relatively important character and how those who are left deal with it. I've killed off the main protagonist's lover a couple times and those scenes were the most difficult of any to get just right—or something close to right, even. I had to dig deeper...

I don't really 'kill' my darlings, that is, passages and lines and scenes that I like — I save them in a file for use in some other story down the line. I mean, if they were 'good' but not suited to the WIP I am not going to throw them out (if nothing else, they may serve as inspiration of a sort).

Any rule on length is arbitrary. I like the 40,000 word cutoff myself — 'The Great Gatsby' is under 50,000 and I certainly consider it a novel. I might call it a 'short novel' but I don't see it as a novella. What is sometimes termed a 'novelette,' up to 15 or 20,000 words I would be inclined to...

I looked into the costs of color illustration when I put out a pair of children's books. It was feasible for a very short picture book but made the beginners' chapter book, with pictures on every other page or so simply too expensive, so I went black and white for that one — the cost was no...

Dang, I usually need to add pages, not delete them.

One complication that immediately comes to mind is that some individuals will fake their status or history, applying art that is not appropriate to their station. There would have to penalties of some sort (in my Mora novels, the nobles have tattoos indicative of their rank and heritage — being...

A few books ago I found I suddenly needed a name for a minor character so I called him Nidanem — pronounced need-a-name...

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true. ~ James Branch Cabell Enough small empty boxes thrown into a big empty box fill it full. ~ Carl Sandburg Anything worth doing is worth doing badly. ~ G.K. Chesterton

I'm The Existential Cowboy on Tumbler (existentialcowboy.tumblr.com). I post drafts of most of my poetry in near-finished form (never finished completely till they are published!) and this and that about books, etc.

It is likely that the numbering of rulers started with the Papacy, not only to distinguish one 'Pius' from the last one, but also to officially state which previous holders of the title were considered true popes. When John XXIII was elected he made sure to publicly add the '23' to the name he...

Mine was a vector graphic I 'drew' for possible use on a cover and never used. So it ended up here instead—mostly because the other pics I considered didn't look like much of anything shrunk to that size.

I'm doing a reread of Haggard's "She" at the moment — and finding occasional bits I have unconsciously stolen over the years... :)

Bill would certainly have no trouble writing. He's a smart guy and good with words. Coming up with interesting plots is an whole other matter.

I haven't created illustrations for any of my novels (aside from the covers and title page) but I have done a couple children's books with my art, a picture book and a beginners' chapter book. Obviously, those sort of books require illustration. Some of my poetry books have my own pictures in...