Recent content by skip.knox

I've been working on social relations among my elves, dwarves, etc., most recently thinking about what constitutes adulthood among the various races. One dividing line is that children cannot take an oath nor testify in court against their parents. And that brought me up against the whole...

To whom is the king talking? The conversation will differ depending on whether it's his marshal, chancellor, powerful duke, wife, childhood buddy, ambassador, court mage, etc. Figure out the situation and you'll be well on your way to choosing the subject matter. He can talk about anything -...

There is violence and non-violence. There is good and evil. Those two polar opposites often intertwine, but they are not synonymous. There is also war and peace. Let's leave aside good and evil (though I'm in the camp that does believe there is genuine evil in both the real world and in fantasy...

You asked what is the difference between low and high fantasy. Then you mentioned that now you're an adult you prefer low to high fantasy. This leaves me puzzled. How do *you* tell the difference? That aside, I'm not sure what it means to approach writing. As Night's Domain says, just write it...

He sacrifices his life. Whether that's a tragedy or not is going to depend on how you write! In general, I think advice would say to introduce them earlier. There's a danger of having both developments feel contrived. But you asked for ideas on how to make it work the way you want it to work...

Oh, one more thing. Another historical example on which you could draw would be university students. We have lots of letters from them writing back home pleading for money. This implies that a common arrangement was to be given an initial stipend, which might be spent too quickly, forcing the...

This was done fairly regularly in the high and late middle ages. An important merchant family such as the Welsers of Augsburg or the Paumgartners of Nuremberg found it was in their interest to have an office in other big cities, such as Bruges or Venice. Those were usually locals, because they...

Fight scenes are not a problem for me. I don't usually enter one until well into the story, so the fight becomes a way to vindicate or exacerbate. Where I struggle is with romance. I think I'm okay with the courting and flirting and caring, but when I try to write serious passion or sex, it...

Not to go too far OT, but here is the guideline I have given my students for the last decade: Wikipedia is a fine place to start your research, but a poor place to stop.

>money wasn't simply doled out sans an expected activity or role Probably, but I can think of exceptions. For example, the de Hauteville boys--all twelve of them! As you can well imagine, daddy Tancred had nowhere near enough estates to settle twelve male heirs, and most of them were simply sent...

Dishonored 2. It's fine, but Horizon: Zero Dawn has set such a high standard, every game since then has been little better than fine.

A monthly allowance would have been possible but unlikely. More usual would have been to give him an income--from family estates or from some other sources (fines, taxes, imposts). Most such incomes were annual rather than monthly, producing something every month being at the extreme edge of...

Short story length definitions ("it's more of a guideline") do not matter. What matters is the length requirements of the magazine to which you are submitting the story. That's it. Don't worry about any of the rest of it. Same goes for novels, comes to that. Are you submitting to a publisher...

I recommend asking this question over at the Cartographers Guild. They will be able to provide both answers and tools. Here we are more focused on actual writing of stories.

I sort of echo FifthView here. My first reaction was that this behavior would work but not if it were in the early chapters. This is a traumatic event. As an author I would want my reader to feel what the character is feeling. To do that, I need to establish a rapport between the reader and the...