You’ve seen our science fiction pics. You’ve seen our favorite horror. Now we’re back with a highly biased, hugely enthusiastic list of the fantasy books we couldn’t live without. If you want to share your fantasy favorites, drop us a line via our blog.
Articles
Verisimilitude and the Competent Con: Research for Fiction
“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof crap detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.”
—Ernest Hemingway
Writers are prone to [...]
Writing Negative Space
In art, negative space is the area around a focal object: white paper behind a line sketch, space between the arms of a sculpture, the background of a photograph. The [...]
Confessions of a Slush Monkey
What do slush readers really love – and really hate? And how do you get past them into the hands of an editor? RE’s own slush reader (or slush monkey, as the reader prefers) gives the inside scoop on a slush reader’s process.
Zen and the Art of Telling Versus Showing
A common piece of advice given to new writers is to “show, don’t tell.” On the surface, it appears to be a very straightforward piece of advice. But in practice, [...]
You Are When You Eat
In an animal sense, feeding ourselves is the most important thing we do every day. What we eat changes us on a chemical, and corresponding emotional, level; how long food [...]
Horror in the House: RE’s Favorite Works of Horror
Part two of our extremely biased and highly enthusiastic list of RE recommendations.
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, ed. Seamus Heaney. What can we say? Battles with monsters never sounded better, [...]
How Not To Be Turned Into a Frog
The wonderful thing about writing about religion is that you are guaranteed certain outcomes:
1) You will get something wrong, even if it’s just the spelling of your name.
2) You will [...]
Utilizing the Unexpected
At thirty, everybody dies.
Okay. Not really; this isn’t Logan’s Run. But sometimes in speculative fiction, it can seem like it. Mystery is the genre of the mature protagonist, while science fiction [...]
Goodbye, Gentle Reader; Hello, Hostile Reader
When I was young and impressionable, I spent many hours reading Isaac Asimov (and with over 500 books published in his lifetime—the man was a fountain of words—there was a [...]
Bustin’ Caps, Bashing Heads, and Bloody Knives: Writing Realistic Violence
Editor’s Note: This article is not an endorsement of violence, nor should it be used as a primer for self-defense. If you want to learn to fight safely and responsibly [...]
The Politics of Dancing
Politics are the basis of human behavior, equally at work in royal courts, high school cliques, military organizations, modern corporations, international negotiations, alien first contact situations, and stone-age tribes. Politics [...]
They Stake Dead Guys, Don’t They?
Oh, to be a vampire. They have it all: money, looks, power, immortality. Considering that the only price seems to be one heck of a drinking problem, what’s not to [...]
Beyond the Looking Glass: How to Write Meaningful Description
Description is easy. It’s fast. It runs up the word count nicely, and keeps those pages coming. But all too often, it doesn’t help the story at all.
We’ve all run [...]