Marc Aplin's Blog, page 221
July 7, 2014
Worldbuilding: Don’t Neglect The Landscape
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 know how long it will take the heroes to cover that distance. You’ve spent a bit of time making sure you know the types of […]
July 6, 2014
Swords of Good Men by Snorri Kristjansson
Death was never as glorious in real life as in the songs, he mused. There was nothing heroic about it, really. You were just alive, and then you were blood and meat and bones in a slightly different order. Ulfar Thormodsson is ready to go back home after two years in exile with his cousin […]
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban Children’s Edition Cover
We’ve been uploading the Harry Potter Children’s Edition covers from Bloomsbury as we’ve been receiving them and the latest one just hit our mailbox, so we thought we’d get it straight to you! For those who don’t know, these Children’s Editions are pretty much the original book but with new art, a bigger font, slightly […]
July 5, 2014
Winner of the February 2014 Writing Contest
We’ve been getting such good feedback for the short stories our members have submitted in our Monthly Short Story Competition that we have decided to post them on the main site at a rate of about one a fortnight. Today we will be looking at the winner from our February 2014 contest. If a book […]
Got Questions about Magical Murder or YA Fantasy?
Owning a renowned Fantasy website certainly has some perks. Next week I’ve been invited to London Film & Comic Convention to moderate not one, but two REALLY exciting panels: Murder Most Magical Three of the biggest names in crime/fantasy are coming to The Book Zone at LFCC to take part in a magical on stage […]
Warhammer 40k Movie gets a trailer…
Did you know that in 2010 an Official Warhammer 40k film was released? No? Well, maybe you did and you understandably forced yourself to forget about it… The sad fact of the matter is that it wan’t very good. Apparently even the team behind it with readily admit this: putting it down to a lack […]
July 4, 2014
The Scourge by Roberto Calas
The zombie apocalypse is already here. Popular culture is overrun with the brainless, flesh-eating revenants. Shambling through the streets of cities throughout the fictional world, terrorizing the countryside from Georgia to Great Britain, zombies have permeated pop culture on a level on par with hobbits, vampires and schools for wizards. For my money, The Walking […]
July 3, 2014
Juliet McKenna Interviews Mark Charan Newton
To celebrate Mark Charan Newton’s new fantasy epic Drakenfeld being released on paperback over here in the UK, Mark Charan Newton has been interviewed by another hugely popular author, Juliet E. McKenna, exclusively for Fantasy-Faction. Topics covered include balancing the fantastical and the historical, the fact Mark’s character IS NOT an anti-hero, the portrayal of […]
Did Shakespeare invent Gollum?
Was Gollum inspired by one of Shakespeare’s villains? Martin Freeman, star of The Hobbit, thinks it’s a distinct possibility. In an Interview with The Telegraph, where he is explaining how he sees and will play the character of Richard III, in the famous play of the same name, Freeman explains that: “I’ve just been rehearsing […]
Crossing the Borders – Guest Post by Adrian Tchaikovsky
When I write a fantasy setting, it stays written. Ten books now, in the Shadows of the Apt series, and I’m still trading on the world-building that took place before the first one. New vistas, new kinden, new technological developments, but it all flows from the ground rules I determined right at the start. Even […]
