Month: October 2012

Tips for World Building from a Fellow Blogger

~ Naomi Edmondson ~ Leave a comment

Another great post with sound and pertinent ideas. I’m seriously going to have to check out George R.R. Martin’s work too. I’ve heard nothing but good about it.

The Poets and the Peddlers

I swear you could teach a class using Game of Thrones as an example of how to do pretty much everything right. I’m going to be using examples from it again. Thank you, George R.R. Martin.

Fantasy and sci-fi authors spend a lot of time building their universes. That was an understatement, but you get the idea. I personally have pages upon pages upon pages written about the trade, political, and casual relations between all of the cities in my fantasy, even more written on racial history. Immortal blood angel queens, dryad superhighways, nymph pseudo-goddesses–and I think I’ve done less worldbuilding in total than most fantasy writers.

Point is, we do all this work, and we’re tempted to dump it all on the readers, which is the worst possible thing we could do.

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Nod to the Special Olympics

~ Naomi Edmondson ~ Leave a comment

A friend showed me to this post and I thought it was an exceptional response. Once again, I am awed by the capacity we as humans have for both such callousness as well as compassion and, quite frankly, just being awesome in John’s case. Well worth sharing.

The World of Special Olympics

The following is a guest post in the form of an open letter from Special Olympics athlete and global messenger John Franklin Stephens to Ann Coulter after this tweet during last night’s Presidential debate.

Dear Ann Coulter,

Come on Ms. Coulter, you aren’t dumb and you aren’t shallow.  So why are you continually using a word like the R-word as an insult?

I’m a 30 year old man with Down syndrome who has struggled with the public’s perception that an intellectual disability means that I am dumb and shallow.  I am not either of those things, but I do process information more slowly than the rest of you.  In fact it has taken me all day to figure out how to respond to your use of the R-word last night.

I thought first of asking whether you meant to describe the President as someone who was bullied as a child…

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World Building Post from a Fellow Blogger – Likeable & Believable Characters

~ Naomi Edmondson ~ 1 Comment

I really enjoyed the points that were touched on here and as a writer, I felt this was definitely worth sharing. Of course, now I’m curious to read Acacia myself but we’ll see what happens. 🙂

The Poets and the Peddlers

A few months ago, someone asked me what elements made a great character. “As long as the character is believable,” I said, “then that’s a good character. They don’t need to be likable–after all, we read about serial killers and tyrants all the time, right?”

Wrong. While characters should be believable, I underestimated the importance of likability and didn’t truly appreciate it until I read a book with believable, but unlikable characters.

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