Skeleton Architecture

If you follow me on Instagram , you'll probably know that at the moment I #amediting. I wrote a first draft of a story that had been tickling away at me for a while back in November for National Novel Writing Month . It's a modern retelling of a traditional Scottish fairy tale which has fascinated me since I came across it. I'm going to call it the Rose book. Once I'd tidied up that first draft I put it away for a while.  I was intending on working on another book. A high fantasy tale which is really rather huge, and which I'd finished the first draft of a while ago, but had then realised it had a massive problem, requiring lots of changes (more on that here ). I'm going to call that the Chaptershill book. I started rethinking things for the Chaptershill book over Christmas and realised that changing little things about the way the society ran had some small impacts, which, like the butterfly effect, ended up having drastic impacts on the plot, a...

I love high fantasy books.  I've written a post about my love of fantasy fiction before, so I shan't go over that again here. Today we'll stick with high fantasy. What's high fantasy? You can check out the Wikipedia entry on the topic, but I'd describe it as big stories, set in slightly magical alternative worlds, often peopled with things like elves. The societies are well worked out, with power structures, religion, and rules for any magic. The most famous books in this genre are probable Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series, although George RR Martin is currently vying for that position with his Song of Ice and Fire series and other stories set in the same world. High fantasy is often set in a medieval-esque world, although it doesn't have to be . Similarly, the books often use medieval-esque societal rules, although they don't have to. These rules often result in women, and races other than white human, getting the short end of a rather shitt...