Fantasy worlds take all shapes and sizes. The physical landscape of your story’s setting plays a large part in its uniqueness. Creating fantastical geography involves more than just drawing maps, however.
Determine the Scope
Building an entire fantasy world can be daunting, and unnecessary. No need to create entire continents if your hero will only be gallivanting [...]

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One of the reasons writing appeals to me is the act of creation. There is nothing quite as satisfying. Fantasy fiction amplifies this satisfaction because I’m not only creating a story, but I get to build an entire world around that story.
World-building is not unique to fantasy fiction. Any time a writer pens a fictional [...]

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A close second to epic fantasy in popularity would be the sword-and-sorcery sub-genre. The term was originally coined by author Fritz Leiber in response to Michael Moorcock’s demand to classify the fantasy adventure stories written by Robert E. Howard. As such, Conan and Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser came to typify sword-and-sorcery.
The genre suffered some [...]

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Epic fantasy, also referred to as high fantasy, is often the sub-genre most people identify as fantasy fiction, thanks to the popular work of Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Terry Brooks, David Eddings and Robert Jordan. Many fantasy fiction authors were first inspired by reading titles from these creators, and aspire to have their own [...]

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Rosemary Jones pointed me to a great web tool for readers and novelists. Goodreads.com is another “social networking revolution” of Web 2.0, where the users generate the content. This time, the focus is on what you read. Your profile consists of “bookshelves,” which are simply tags you create to categorize the books you’ve read, want [...]

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