Category: Writing
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Making a Fantasy Map: Drawing Coastlines
If you want to learn how to make a map in more detail—or you’d like to make one but can’t due to Affinity’s pricetag—then take a look at my new eBook: How to Make a Fantasy Map: A Writer’s Guide to Otherworldly Cartography. You’ll learn more advanced techniques for making a fantasy map (including how…
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Making a Fantasy Map: Introduction
If you want to learn how to make a map in more detail—or you’d like to make one but can’t due to Affinity’s pricetag—then take a look at my new eBook: How to Make a Fantasy Map: A Writer’s Guide to Otherworldly Cartography. You’ll learn more advanced techniques for making a fantasy map, and you’ll…
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What is Americanist Phonetic Notation?
In my last article on linguistics I reviewed the American Heritage Dictionary’s phonetic notation system. It was bad to say the least (the American Heritage Dictionary, I mean—not my article, hopefully). But there are other alternatives one might choose instead of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). I’m going to examine one of those today from…
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The Problem with the American Heritage Dictionary
Most dictionaries use a system of transcribing sounds called the International Phonetic Alphabet (or IPA). It eliminates most ambiguities so that—if you know how to use it—you can figure out exactly how a word should be pronounced. The IPA is also useful if you want to make up a fictional language for your story, as…
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Using the IPA to Create a Fantasy Language
If you’re creating a fictional language for a fantasy story, you’ll want to do more than build words out of letters. What you’re going to need are sounds and a way to write them without ambiguity. In this article, I will discuss how the International Phonetic Alphabet can help you invent a fantasy language. To…
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Writing Tip: The International Phonetic Alphabet Is Your Friend
If you’re writing a fantasy story that takes place in a different world, you’ll more than likely have to make up some words. Maybe you want to create a whole language, or maybe you just need a few names for characters or places. Either way, words are a big deal in the fantasy genre; they…
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Stop Calling Fullmetal Alchemist 2003 “The Original”
I explained in my last article some of the reasons I consider the original Fullmetal Alchemist manga by Hiromu Arakawa to be superior to the 2003 anime, whose plot was utterly removed from that of the source material. The 2003 anime does have its fans, though, and that’s completely fine. However, a strange thing happened…
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Review of Rankin/Bass “The Return of the King” (1980)
This cartoon… This is the one that broke me… I feel drained after watching this. Before there was Peter Jackson, there were three cartoons almost unrelated to one another, and I made the mistake of deciding to review all of them. The first was a children’s animated TV special by Rankin/Bass that removed almost every…
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The Grimdark Genre and Why I Hate It
I’m supposed to be the one with cynical, even nihilistic tendencies. Why is it that I’m the one having to stand up and defend humanity as not being irreparably broken? I once wrote an article about the differences between Epic Fantasy and its largely American counterpart Sword & Sorcery. This article will be somewhat similar,…
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Scrivener 2 Review
Scrivener 2 is dead—long live Scrivener 3! Read about it in my more recent article: Why You Should Use Scrivener 3. I don’t know if I can offer Scrivener 2 any praise that’s not already been said, and even as I write this I’m terrified of simply regurgitating what many, many others have written on…