Tag archives for Fiction - Page 16
Book Review – Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett
Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett My rating: 4 of 5 stars To begin with I was worried that Pterry had lost his touch. This book is somewhat different to the earlier discworld stories in that it lacks a geographic focus, however once I got into it I realised that this was because the coming of the railway means that the world is so much smaller. The focus in this book isn't a handful of characters in a limited environment, but the handful of characters spread all over the area covered by the trains. The introduction of steam to the discworld gives it a very 19th century feel. Somehow this does it in a way that the clacks didn't. The main protagonist is Moist von Lipwig but Vetinari, Vimes and the Watch feature as support along with dwarves and goblins. Unusually…
Writing Exercise – Bored Athlete meets Lovesick Witch
So the second part of the online tutorial for the creative writing course (A215 from the Open University) was to take the character that I made up in the first part (the lovesick witch) and then write a dialogue scene where she met one of the other characters. I had a choice of two others, either of which would have made a good scene. I chose the bored athlete because one of the other students had already posted a meeting between the lovesick witch and the introvert adolescent. The target word count was 200 and most of it needed to be the dialogue, no more than a third to be scene setting. I sort of broke that last rule a bit, but think it still works. So here it is. Bored Athlete meets Lovesick Witch Walking home through the park…
Writing Exercise – Lovesick Witch
I'm in the middle of a 10 day online tutorial for A215 Creative Writing (not continuously for ten days, thankfully, but in little bits posted to the tutor group forum over a ten day period). So the first task was to create a character randomly based on two lists, one of traits/conditions and the other of occupations. Being a gamer I rolled dice to choose my combination and got 'Lovesick Witch'. So here are the 200 words (199 actually) that I wrote to show that character (the rules being that it needed to be show in third person, rather than a descriptive tell and that we needed to avoided stereotypes). Lovesick Witch Her phone still had no updates. When he’d smiled at her, she felt warm inside. She’d re-read the message asking if she wanted to meet him for coffee…
Book Review: Trading in Danger by Elizabeth Moon
Trading in Danger by Elizabeth Moon My rating: 4 of 5 stars I came to this from a first chapter included at the end of the kindle edition of Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. This is a different sort of space opera from Ancillary Justice, but the opening chapter was so gripping that I immediately ordered a copy so that I could read the rest of it. The universe it is set in is sort of recognisable as a fast forward on our current one. The initial setting is in a naval academy that would be recognisable to anyone with military experience (and the author served in the USMC, no doubt she drew on that). That's just the starting point for the story though, and most of the action takes place on board an interstellar freighter. The story is told…
A215 Short Fiction: Daprav – A Creation Myth
As part of my Creative Writing course I need to write a short story for my next assignment. So rather than racking my brains about it I've been going back over stuff I'd written, but not finished, in the past for some inspiration. I also plan to do the exercises in the book to see what that sparks up too. Anyway I was looking through my role-playing archives and went through a fantasy game I used to run where I made up all of the setting myself rather than using a published one (there are about 17k words on this, and on top of that a stack of index cards). I was rather taken by the creation myth I wrote for the primary god in a theocracy. Daprav It is important to distinguish between Daprav Himself and the Church, which…