Keep It Simple: If you get your hands on a hero, don’t go for some elaborate form of execution. If you maroon them on a cannibal-infested island, they will get off (and possibly make friends with the natives). If you lock them up with a vicious animal, they will kill it. If you leave them…
Shannon’s Blog
And the Moral of the Story …
Christian fiction is often designed to teach some sort of moral. There is some debate among Christian readers and writers as to which is better – writing a story to teach a lesson or writing a story with no particular point to make. I have done both. My Christian Holmes series – all short stories…
Story Length
Whenever I complete another ten pages of my novel (as the pages are in my computer file), I run a word count to see how much I have written. I began the counts because I read that the average length of a novel was 70K-90K words, and I was eager to meet that benchmark. I…
Can Aliens Be Saved?
One preoccupation of the modern era is outer space, the multitude of planets and the possibility of intelligent beings other than ourselves. It has occasionally been wondered what it would mean for Christianity if we discovered extraterrestrial life – or it discovered us. This November a Times reporter named Hannah Devlin posted an article whose…
Naming Characters
Over the course of writing The Last Heir, I acquired several methods of naming characters. One was to establish naming patterns – Greek and biblical were my origins of choice, and Gaelic was a resort after that. Lists of Greek names could be found on baby-name sites that sorted by origin. Biblical (or “Hebrew”) names…
Sci-fi/Fantasy, Sci-fi vs. Fantasy
Science fiction and fantasy tend to be grouped together. Whether listed as “sci-fi/fantasy” by sellers or called “speculative fiction” by enthusiasts, the assumption is that they are the same kind of story. And, in a significant way, they are. Both bring us to worlds other than our own, filled with strange creatures and things that…
Update: The Other View
Entry 3 has been added to The Other View, starring Colten Shevyn. Enjoy!
Cast of Characters
(Scroll down to view the Pronunciation Guide.) A woman who has been reading The Last Heir sent in this comment: I’m really enjoying Shannon’s book! Great job, Shannon! I think it would be neat if you made a list of characters available, with just a short reminder of who’s who, and maybe also with pronunciations….
Announcing ‘The Other View’
A new section has been added to the website, called “The Other View”. It is for postings of short fiction, all taking place within the universe and story of The Last Heir. The vantage point taken of the story is one never found in the novel itself, providing the other view.
The World of Faerie
Last fall I began to think of writing a fantasy novel. This was a dubious idea for two reasons. One, I had read little fantasy, and most of that was Tolkien and Lewis. And two, the closest I had come in all my life to writing fantasy was a grade-school story about a talking bird…