N.O.A. Rawle: Through the Eyes of a Stranger

A guest post by David Wiley When I sat down to write Monster Huntress, I didn’t know much about the world in which it was taking place. I knew the type of world I wanted, but it transformed and evolved over the course of revisions, always growing either in size or in the details. While the story of Monster Huntress visits only a small portion of the world I’ve created, there are some lessons I’ve learned from J.R.R. Tolkien that have had a ripple effect toward my approach to worldbuilding. The biggest of those lessons was to provide the promise of something greater. What I mean by that is there is something more out there beyond what the reader is experiencing. There is a larger world, other events going on. There is a rich history, filled with named heroes and battles and events that can be referred to over the course of the book. The reader doesn’t need to know what the Wizard Wars were, for instance, but knowing that there was some massive war hundreds of years ago is important ...

Peculiar goings-on after authors participate in Lit Select's Legendary Stories: What Went Wrong anthology. Strange reports have been coming in that contributors to Lit Select's Legendary Stories: What Went Wrong anthology didn't know what they were getting themselves into when their work was accepted for the anthology. Time Out for Teachers Our correspondent from Northern California reveals that middle school teacher and writer, Jan Flynn, has developed an alarming disability. "I began having trouble with my right thumb," she confessed earlier this week. "At first, I thought it was a minor complaint due to the sheer weight of marking and writing I have to do." But when she developed an odd, hard lump near the distal knuckle, she knew things were not quite right. "It tingles with pain when I type on my keyboard; when I write in longhand, it obliges me to adopt an odd, claw-like grip on the pen in order to write at all." she says. ...