Christopher D. Votey's Blog, page 16

Worldbuilding #8a – Advanced Mountains

Welcome to another edition of the Worldbuilding series. In our last article, I taught you how to put mountains on your map. I also gave you some thoughts about how mountains are formed and the different kinds there are. Today, we take the simple 2D mountains on your map and give them some texture, to give more of a 3D look.

Like all tutorials, I am going to show you the basic technique I used and it is up to you how you want to use it to create your maps. You may decide you want to use differe...

Express Your Meme (EYM) – Lines from my current WIP

Welcome to another edition of Express Your Meme. Thanks to Jackie at Bouquet of Books and Dani at Entertaining Interests for setting this up and running it. This is a weekly Blog-Hop that challenges us to answering different ideas about ourselves and our work.

It’s been awhile since I’ve done this. I didn’t do it because I was unable to answer the last few, but I hope to do these as much as I can do. It’s great being part of a community, no matter how small or how large.

This week seems like a...

Writing Process Blog Hop

Special thanks to Natasha Duncan-Drake for adding me to this blog hop. This is an interesting one as it is geared towards the how and why of my writing process. I look forward to this.

Rules:

Introduce who referred the blog tour to you
Answer the following 4 questions:

What am I working on?
How does my work differ from others in its genre?
Why do I write what I do?
How does my writing process work?


Introduce the people you’re passing this on to (3 – 4 people if possible who will then post a week lat...

IWSG — July Optimisim

So, quite a bit to talk about in this one. I try to reserve IWSG for the woes in life but too many good things have happened as of late for me to do that. Going forward, I hope the good times continue.

Of course saying that, I’m inviting impending doom. But talking about the impending doom will bring me good fortune. It all works out in the end.

So… where to start?

Yes, I am tonguing a sheep.

Well, let’s start at the beginning. Phoenix Comicon. Early in the month of June, I went to Phoenix comico...

Interviews – Kimberly S. Daniels

Today I get to interview Kimberly Daniels. And by today, I mean I did it several days ago and now displaying it for all to see. Kimberly, who is a self-proclaimed boring person who is anything but boring. She has a great sense of humor and lot to offer for anyone interested in becoming an author. She was also a lot of fun to chat with.

Kimberly has published 2 novels for the Valkyrie Series, with a new book to be released very soon.

Text Interview

Tell us a bit about yourself.

My name is Kimberly...

Worldbuilding #8 – Mountains

We have finally come to mountains. The long awaited mountains. Mountains are extremely important for when we make our map, yet we have designed a great many other things first. Most worldbuilding resources will tell you to start with mountains, and for good reason you should. However, in this tutorial we didn’t ask we needed to get many things out of the way. Think of it as a puzzle. Before you can get the main image of what the puzzle creates, you have to start with the border pieces.

As stat...

Guest Post – Creating Complex Secondary Characters Using Tarot

I present to you today a new technique I developed to help me create dynamic complex characters for your story by using tarot cards. This is being hosted on Sophie Duncan’s site. This is a two part article.

Guest Post: Creating Complex Secondary Characters Using Tarot by Chris Votey (Part 1 – The Spread & The Bases)
Guest Post: Creating Complex Secondary Characters Using Tarot by Chris Votey (Part 2 – Cores & Pillars, plus Sample Reading)

Check out her site, read my article and some of hers, and...

Interview – Justin Bienvenue

*Justin declined a video interview*

1. Tell us a bit about yourself.

I live in a town south of Boston, Massachusetts. I like to consider myself a poet aside from being an author and writer. I enjoy writing because it is my way to create and expand my mind and put my thoughts onto paper or a screen. I am a friendly and outgoing person, I enjoy sports and am always willing to try new things as long as they aren’t too crazy. I am not a big reader though I definitely read a lot more now that I am a...

Cancelled Blog-con

For those of you that follow my blog, you may noticed that yesterday I only had 1 blog post for my Madness Blog-con and that I didn’t post about the panels I attended. More than that, I took blog-con off the menus up top. Or you just found out now because I just told you.

I am stopping it. Why? I know I made a lot of promises to my fans and to people at Phoenix Comicon that I would be doing this, yet I am making the decision to stop. There are several reasons actually for me stopping it.

First...

Madness Blog-Con PC 14 – Pierce Brown

Some authors seem like larger than life people. They are intimidating. How can you, starting your career, ever compare to them? How can you get on their level? As great as they are, in truth, they are not too dissimilar to you. The difference is that they are more confident, cocky maybe, and took the plunge to do everything they could to write and make a career out of it. The true difference between an author and a writer is the act of trying.

Today we meet Pierce Brown

Unfortunately there is n...