Morning Coffee – 20 February 2018
Here are a few stories to read this Wednesday morning.
- Courtney Milan flays her plagiarist alive.
- Nick Fancher deleted his entire social media presence.
- Cait Reynolds explains the many details that fantasy novels get wrong when it comes to food.
- Here’s how you can install the KOReader app on your Kobo ereader with a single click.
- Karen Whiting offers tips on how to get the most out of writer conferences.
Comments
Richard Hershberger February 21, 2019 um 9:56 am
Cait Reynolds is absolutely right. One attribute of Bad Fantasy, of which there is an abundance, is Bad Worldbuilding. Food clearly is her thing. Names, and language in general, is mine. If a character’s name is recognizably real-world, this tells us something about the character. What exactly can depend on the setting. An Old English name in The Lord of the Rings isn’t telling us this guy is an Anglo-Saxon, but neither is it just a random thing. Many authors have no sense of this sort of thing. I find it very off-putting. One way around it is the random string of letters approach, typically with lots of punctuation marks and capitals inserted in interesting places. The frankly doesn’t work all that well. Or you can randomly made-up names, but which follow the principles of English phonology. This is better. Best yet is to do your damned homework.