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How to Deconstruct Fantasy Tropes for Your Own Benefit

Today I thought I’d share a little bit of the work I’ve been doing for my current work in progress. It’s going to be a fantasy story in the sword-and-sorcery style. If you want to know a little bit more about it and how it came to be, you can read this post: New Story Idea. So here’s how I’m going about it. I started with many of the standard f...

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Magali Luyten

The other day I was cruising around the web and came across this amazing singer named Magali Luyten. She’s from Belgium, which gave me an instant predisposition to like her, since I lived there for about 8 months a little over a decade ago. I can even pronounce her oddly-spelled last name correctly. I’d try to describe the peculiar diphthong, bu...

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What You Can Learn From Your Site's Statistics

In keeping with my last post on how to grow your author blog, I thought I’d share a few things about my site’s statistics and how I’ve been trying to use them to grow my own blog. Not too long ago, I installed a plugin on my blog to keep track of statistics. I wanted to try figuring out what kind of content was working the best and what kind ...

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How to Grow Your Author Blog

One of the misconceptions I had about starting a blog was that people would simply appear out of nowhere to read it. While I have had a few random visitors who chose to leave comments, my readers consist largely of a few fellow aspiring writers who I either know in real life or who know one of those people. There are a few things I’ve learned by...

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d20pro

As mentioned in my last post, I’ve been using d20pro to run a traditional table-top roleplaying game. d20pro serves as a virtual tabletop with lots of cool features, displaying maps and character markers, keeping track of character sheets, and even rolling the dice for you. All of your NPCs and monsters are built in. You can share arbitrary file...

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Pathfinder and d20pro

It’s been a while since I posted anything about gaming. Lately I’ve been playing a new game that some friends introduced to me. It’s called Pathfinder, and many RPGers have probably heard of it before. Especially since Wizards of the Coast ditched DnD 3.5 and moved to 4e, Pathfinder has been filling in the huge gulf and pleasing a lot of gamers....

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Witch Song by Amber Argyle

I had a great time at LTUE. Although I’m a hopeless introvert, I managed to meet a few people thanks to the generosity of my friend Michelle. One of the people I met is Amber Argyle, a writer whose first book, Witch Song, is coming out this September from Rhemalda Publishing. Witch Song is a young adult fantasy with a beautiful cover: ...

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LTUE 2011 Schedule

Even though nobody who reads my blog seems interested, I keep talking about LTUE. I loved it last year. It’s totally worth your investment. Here are some of the panels I am excited to attend this year. The Business of Being a Writer Can your dreams pay your bills? Charisma is not a dump stat: the importance of professionalism and looking ...

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