Tales from the Circle

I had the pleasure of writing a guest post for FanFiAddict about world-building and some of the elements that make readers connect with the world and want to visit it.  Building an Immersive World   In it, I talk quite a bit about Tolkien's Middle Earth as well as some of my favourite immersive reads including K. S. Villoso's Agartes Epilogues and Daniel E. Olesen's Chronicles of Adalmearc.  And to celebrate the guest post I've put up my big epic fantasy book Children of the Dead City up for sale . You can get all 375K words for only $0.99 - and I'm hoping readers will find it immersive and fun! :) 

I think probably the first self-published book I read was Hugh Howey's Wool, which I found on my library's online ebooks collection. Ever since then I've been slowly reading more and more self-published stuff. There are a variety of reasons for this including but not limited to: I've pretty much exhausted my local library's Fantasy and Sci Fi collection When you're looking outside the library (aka, having to buy the books you read) self-published works are a lot more affordable (seriously, the prices of trad published ebooks are ridiculous) and there are often free works that are excellent I've found a lot more variation and creativity in self-pub works and a lot less of the tropes I got tired of. For example, I'm much more likely to just find a fantasy work that doesn't contain a love story shoehorned into it in Self-Pub works... My forays back into traditional publishing and the "classics" or super famous SF&F have not sati...

I’ve been wondering lately about what, exactly, it is that makes a reader care. About the characters. About the world. About the stakes presented in the story. Because there are a lot of stories that will present huge stakes and have decent prose and do a lot of stuff right, but they still don’t manage to make me care at all. On the author end I may care a lot about a certain character, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to write about them in a way that makes the reader care. And of course every reader is different. Maybe this is just another way of procrastinating on my actual writing, but I kind of want to explore some of the things that make me, personally, care when I’m reading a book. Things that pull me in and make me invested. Like I said above, every reader is different, but I’ll start with my own personal preferences and then see if I can take a step back and generalize them somehow. I’ll begin my exploration by choosing a few of the books or series that I enjoye...