The Authors of Spells: Ten Tales of Magic

Rayne Hall gave me the great pleasure and honor of revealing the lineup of authors contributing to this soon-to-be-released anthology. I am so pleased to be in the company of so many magnificent writers!

Coming Soon!

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

CIARA BALLINTYNE is a writer of high fantasy short stories and novels. She lives in Sydney, Australia, and practises law by day. You can learn more about her and her fiction at her website, www.ciaraballintyne.com

CJ BURRIGHT writes urban fantasy and paranormal romance. She is a member of RWA, including the Future, Fantasy & Paranormal Chapter, and lives in the Pacific Northwest of the USA.

T. D. EDGE won a Cadbury's fiction competition at age 10 but only did it for the chocolate. He has published several children's/YA books (writing as Terry Edge) with Random House, Scholastic, Corgi and others. Terry was the first UK writer to attend the 6-week Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop in New Hampshire. Since then, his short fiction has appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including Aeon, Realms of Fantasy, Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Flash Fiction Online. In May 2012, he won the New Scientist/Arc Magazine Science Fiction short story competition, and his story, “Big Dave's in Love” appears in Arc 1.2. Terry has been a street theatre performer, props maker for the Welsh National Opera, sign writer, school caretaker, soft toys salesman and professional palm-reader. He is also proud of being the youngest-ever England Subbuteo Champion, and one of his current writing projects is “Subbuteo for the Soul”. He lives in London. http://www.td-edge.com/

RAYNE HALL lives in a dilapidated English seaside town of former Victorian grandeur where she writes subtle horror and outrageous fantasy fiction. Her short stories have been published in many magazines, e-zines and anthologies, including NocturnalOoze, The Deepening, Byzarium, Fate&Fortune, AlienSkin, True Story, Fiction Feast, Read by Dawn Vol 1, Six Scary Tales Vol 1, 2 and 3. She has had more than 30 books published in several genres under several pen names, including the dark epic fantasy novel Storm Dancer. Her editing experience in the publishing industry spans three decades. She is also the editor of other books in the Ten Tales series. She teaches online classes for writers: http://sites.google.com/site/writingworkshopswithraynehall/. Her website is http://sites.google.com/site/raynehallsdarkfantasyfiction/. You can follow her on Twitter: @raynehall

JEFF HARGETT is a grandfather from North Carolina with an imagination full of magic and dragons. He stays young and fit by dining on epic fantasy whenever possible. He’s had a couple short stories place in competitions, but prefers his fiction in novel-length doses. He is currently writing an epic fantasy series that he hopes will be published while he can still wield a pen. He’s a firm believer that when this world doesn’t suit you, you should write a world that does. He enjoys interacting with readers and other writers and spends far too much time loitering around his blog http://StrandsOfPattern.blogspot.com/.

DOUGLAS KOLACKI began writing while stationed with the Navy in Naples, Italy, published numerous stories in San Diego, and recently completed a cross-country trek to his new home in Providence, Rhode Island. His short story credits include Weird Tales, Dragons Knights & Angels, Haunted: Ten Tales of Ghosts, Bites: Ten Tales of Vampires, Cutlass: Ten Tales of Pirates and Big Pulp. His published novels are Elijah's Chariot and On the Eighth Day, God Created Trilby Richardson.

DAVID D. LEVINE is a lifelong SF reader whose midlife crisis was to take a sabbatical from his high-tech job to attend Clarion West in 2000. It seems to have worked. He made his first professional sale in 2001, won the Writers of the Future Contest in 2002, was nominated for the John W. Campbell award in 2003, was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Campbell again in 2004, and won a Hugo in 2006 (Best Short Story, for Tk'Tk'Tk). His short story Titanium Mike Saves the Day was nominated for the Nebula Award in 2007, and a collection of his stories, Space Magic from Wheatland Press, won the Endeavour Award in 2009. In January of 2010 he spent two weeks at a simulated Mars base in the Utah desert, which led to a highly-regarded slide show and The Mars Diaries, a self-published hardcopy collection of his and his crewmates' blogs. His story Citizen-Astronaut, a science fiction novelette partially based on his "Mars" experience, won second prize in the Baen Memorial Contest, was published in Analog, and came in second in the 2011 AnLab Readers' Poll. David lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife, Kate Yule, with whom he edits the fanzine Bento, and their website is at http://www.BentoPress.com.

TARA MAYA loves rampaging robots, undersea unicorns, magic gone amuck, science turned apocalyptic, pirates dueling gladiators, kittens, cannibals and all things weird and wonderful. She has lived in Africa, Europe and Asia, pounded sorghum with mortar and pestle in a little clay village where the jungle meets the desert, meditated in a Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas and sailed the Volga river to a secret city that was once the heart of the Soviet space program. This first-hand experience, as well as research into the strange and piquant histories of lost civilizations, inspires her writing. Her terrible housekeeping, however, is entirely the fault of pixies.

She has studied ancient and modern history, sometimes even in school. She is the author of The Unfinished Song, an epic fantasy series in which two lovers are caught between the schemes of the Fae and the Deathsworn, and Conmergence, a collection of speculative fiction short stories. She blogs at Tara Maya’s Tales: http://taramayastales.blogspot.com/

CHERIE REICH is a writer, freelance editor, book blogger, and library assistant living in Virginia. Her short stories have appeared in various magazines and anthologies. Her other works include the Nightmare series, the Gravity trilogy, and the Foxwick Chronicles series. She is a member of Valley Writers and the Virginia Writers Club. For more information, please visit her website at http://cheriereich.webs.com and her blog at http://cheriereich.blogspot.com.

PAMELA TURNER divides her time between writing paranormal and urban fantasy and being her cat’s scratching post. She published her first short novel, Death Sword, with Lyrical Press in 2011. A lover of fantasy, horror, and mystery, she’s a member of the Romance Writers of America, Electronic Publishing Industry Coalition, Sisters in Crime and a supporting member of the Horror Writers Association. Her stories have been featured in Bites: Ten Tales Of Vampires, Beltane: Ten Tales of Witchcraft and Scared: Ten Tales of Horror. Besides writing, she enjoys reading, photography, playing chess (although she’s lousy at the game), physics, aviation, the Tarot, and hanging out in cemeteries. http://pamelaturner.net

How a Geek Writes an Epic Fantasy part 2

In my previous post (How a Geek Writes an Epic Fantasy part 1) I introduced you to Magic Muse, my writing workbench.  But that's only a portion of my Epic Fantasy Writing tool set.  I also wrote an additional program that I call Visual Story.  (One day I'll merge the two into a single application.)  It has a number of uses, but I use it (loosely) as a storyboard or outline interface.

Essentially, the application consists of textboxes that can be sized and arranged on a large backdrop.  Each box contains one section for a title or heading and a second section for content.  Colors can be applied to each box's borders, titles and content.  I prefer setting the border colors according to plots.

I tend to wrap a complete chapter into a single box.  I list a description of the chapter's scene(s) and indicate which character's viewpoint is being used for each scene.  This works well for documenting chapters already written.  For planning, well, let's just say that this is about as close to true outlining as I get.

I've written a number of other applications over the years.  One served as virtual index cards that I intended to use for character bios, description of places and things, etc., but I've found that my scribblet in Magic Muse serves that purpose well enough for me.

But as much as I love my electronic tools, I don't rely exclusively on them.

Whiteboard
I have a whiteboard beside my desk at all times.  I've been known to draw on the whiteboard.  I sketched out the Hosiyin Citadel from my first book on it.  There were characteristics I knew I wanted, but I needed my eyes to see it so I could see it through a character's eyes.

I use the fine-tipped dry-erase markers so I can scribble loads of legible text.  I'll occasionally jot down the names of characters that need addressing in the story and how soon.  I'll work out plot mechanics for finding logical reasons for Character A to be in Location B so that Event C transpires according to plan.  I may write about dragons and magic, but even they must adhere to some form of logic.

Journal
When it comes down to fleshing out my world's settings, background, history and other such trivia that makes it into the manuscript only by--at best--a passing reference. Journals and diaries are great places for me to discover my world's history, back story.

I used this method for working out details of the last major war in my book, exploring treaty details, discovering the origins of races, even for writing short stories that serve no purpose other than enabling me to flesh out characters before they make it into the book.

The actual manuscript
I sometimes type quick notes, reminders, potential dialog or possible narrative snippets right inside the manuscript itself, usually at the end of the scene or chapter.  I do this when the snippet must be addressed or incorporated before moving too far into the next scene or chapter.

I've tinkered with index cards, college or narrow ruled spiral-bound notebooks, even loose leaf paper, but I really prefer a searchable, organized electronic means to store notes. And of course, I now have my Android tablet.  It's great for proofing what I've written.  The format and display is just different enough that I'll spot mistakes that I've overlooked a hundred times on the computer monitor.

What tools do you use?

How a Geek Writes an Epic Fantasy part 1

It's tough not to be a geek when you're male, a computer programmer and a lover of fantasy.  In fact, I'm so geeky that I wrote my own computer program to help me write my epic fantasy.  (That should rank me fairly high on the geek-o-meter, yes?)

My biggest challenge in writing epic fantasy is consistency.  Spend too many months "discovery writing" anything of that scope and errors are bound to creep into the manuscript.  Red hair becomes blonde.  A character is from Osek-Dahm in one chapter and suddenly from Jerok Thel in a subsequent one.  If you're not careful you may even forget which distant countries are at war with each other.

So I needed to find a quick and easy way to record these details and have them readily available when needed.  I searched the net.  I found some that had good features.  I found some that had marvelous interfaces.  But I didn't find one that tripped my trigger.  But hey, not a problem, I'm a software developer so there was really only one choice I could make.

Write my own!

And so I did.  I created Magic Muse, my very own, tailor-made, writing workbench.

This is a Visual Basic application I wrote many years ago to handle all the things that I felt I needed in a writing application.  I still use it for drafts.  It interfaces with MS Word for word counts, thesaurus, spell and grammar checking.  It even allows me to paste in maps and other diagrams.

All projects can be selected via a dropdown and each project can contain any number of cabinets, folders and documents displayed in the treeview on the left.  

I use the treeview to add, delete and reorder chapters and scenes.  Clicking a scene within the treeview opens it in the RTF (Rich Text Format) editor on the right.  Each scene is saved as an RTF document that I can load into MS Word, Open Office, MS Wordpad, etc.  When the book is finished, I can package its contents into a single RTF usable by those same word processors.  (Handy when you want to pump out a quick eBook using Word and Calibre for proofing on the Android tablet.)

Notes can be handled in one of two ways.  A cabinet can be created to hold all notes, which can also be broken down into multiple folders and documents.  My preference for most notes, however, is the scribblet.  That's the window attached to the bottom of the treeview and editor.  There are dedicated sections for things like characters, places, glossary of terms, etc.

The scribblet is collapsible.  To get items into the scribblet, I highlight the word I want to add, right-click it, and indicate which scribblet list should hold it.  I can then add all the generic information about the term and save it.  I can even "index" the term and Magic Muse will scan every scene and provide me with a complete list of where it was used.  (This is handy if I know I referenced the minor character Terrin, but don't recall which chapters featured him.)

I can do all the basic word processing tasks in Magic Muse.  And being able to quickly toggle between scenes instead of scrolling through a huge document is a massive plus for me.

In part two of this post I'll discuss additional ways I handle notes and plot lines, including my storyboard application that I, of course, wrote for myself.  I call it Visual Story and will leave you with a sneak peek at it.