“We’re here.” Pelban halted before the unlit porch of the old house and turned to face me. The play of shadows cast his weathered features in ominous planes. I frowned, my brow furrowing for just a moment before I smoothed my features. Pelban’s smile told me he saw anyway. “Trust me, Keldon,” he said. I [...]

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I’m aborting my foray into RPG blogging. I am often overcome with a variety of creative impulses, and tend to follow too many of them, until I find my resources stretched thin and in danger of snapping. The last couple months have been a time of assessment and pruning, until my course realigned with the [...]

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There are many different types of heroes, each with their own set of motivations and methods. Picking the right protagonist for the story is an important task for a fantasy fiction writer. While I don’t subscribe to the theory that characters can take over a story and rewrite it, I have experienced struggles in writing [...]

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Logan Shadowhand presented some challenges for me as he evolved from a roleplaying game character into a fantasy fiction protagonist. I had no literary aspirations for the character until I recreated him as a non-player character for one of my Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. He and his elf partner (who was also destined to become [...]

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It’s pretty rare to find a stand-alone fantasy novel anymore. Fantasy fiction tends to come in sets: trilogies, episodic series, or some epic number of volumes. Part of this is marketing, the building of a brand and fostering reader loyalty to that brand. The artist in me prefers to think of it in terms of [...]

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