Well, since we’re about to enter the spookiest season and since I’m after all writing a Gothic novel, I thought I could start with one of the oldest tropes in the world: the story in which the hero overcomes a hideous monster. According to Christopher Booker and his Seven Basic Plots, this is not only […]
I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept that “there are only seven notes in music”, often used and misused when a melody sounds a little too familiar to the ear. Well, there’s a similar thing in fiction, and I thought I could elaborate a little on this for people who are interested in writing tips […]
On day 2 of Giambattista Basile‘s 1634 Tale of Tales, also known as The Pentameron, the sixth tale features a story that’s close to “Allerleirauh” by the Grimm Brothers and features some typical tropes in folklore, including shapeshifting through a magical object. Henriette-Julie de Murat, a XVII Century aristocratic French writer, uses this same device […]
Today’s post on my Patreon is the outline of a Galician folktale: it tells the story of a guy born with supernatural strength from the unwilling union of a woman with a bear, who battles the Devil, goes down a well and gets the girl. Does it sound familiar? Well, if it does, it might […]
A few weeks ago, I wrote a brief outline on the character of Joan of Navarre, the first English Queen to be accused of witchcraft, who was effectively stripped of all her possessions because her stepson Henry V had spent all the crown’s money trying to conquer France. Her story is closely connected to the […]
I recently saw on Instagram one of those text posts concerning writing tricks and it dealt with chapter titles: how to pick them and so on. So it got me thinking that I kind of took for granted the way I assigned titles to the WIP of my novel, while in reality it was not. […]
Surprise post on my Patreon today: are you familiar with the short story “Susan and the Mermaid” by Pamela Colman Smith? It was printed in the December 1912 issue of The Delineator magazine. You can read it over there.
Today on my Patreon, we take a look at a passage from Book 2 in the Dresden Files series and address how lore could be passed upon the reader without being boring and incurring in inconsistencies. You can read it here.
Although not the first to be tried for witchcraft, Joan of Navarre has the distinction of being the first English Queen to be found guilty of it. She’s today’s profile on my Patreon.