The genre of high fantasy romance (sometimes simply called fantasy romance), offers what its title suggests. You can expect elements of epic high fantasy: invented worlds, fantasy creatures, magic, royalty,…
You have your story, your plot, your characters, sub-texts and themes. On a piece, or several, of paper you have sketched out a map, worked out the travel distances and…
Fantasy, whether epic, high, or sword-and-sorcery, would not be very exciting if the characters were as susceptible to death and disability as we are in the real world. The truth…
I recently I submitted a story to my writing group for critique. It was a secondary-world fantasy set in a pre-industrial port city. Of all the comments I received, the…
George RR Martin’s now famous analogy of the architect and the gardener distilled the craft of novel-writing into two distinct creative approaches. I would suggest that this is a particularly…
Today we are delighted to welcome one of our favourite authors Sam Sykes (also known as Samus Sykesimus on the Roman Gladiator circuit) to Fantasy-Faction. I don’t really need to…
This article may contain mild spoilers – though not what I would consider story-breaking spoilers – for The Folding Knife by K.J. Parker, Making Money by Terry Pratchett and Best…
Hoglers don’t exist. You’ve never heard of them, and I’ve certainly never heard of them. As an object of the imagination, they defy description. This is a challenge that faces…
Before a photographer takes a photo, a lot of considerations run through her mind: composition, metering, white balance, light sensitivity, aperture size. She does this because she knows it will…
Okay, so there weren’t iPods in Narnia…but there are in ancient Egypt. Sort of. If you read Rick Riordan’s Kane Chronicles. A lot of fantasy writers find it tricky to…
As fantastical as our genre is, there has always been some leakage from the real world to the ones lodged between the pages we devour. Love, war, anger, sex, despair,…
For a while now there has been an emphasis on realism in our fantasy, which has created some exciting new stories and series, including some personal favourites. However, as the…
Nicola Alter
Geoff Matthews
B. Pine
Eric Christensen
Nick Clark
Sam Sykes
Victoria Hooper
Thomas A. Knight
Nicole Singer
Ben Galley