Rocket Kapre – Fantastic Filipino Speculative Fiction

Today’s Writer’s Wednesday is brought to you by… The Farthest Shore. We’ll focus on fantasy today (the secondary world sort at least), although there’s always an overlap with other branches of SF. We’ve got links to a pair of resources you might find useful for world building as well as a list of fantasy-relevant writing tips, old and new.

Baiting the Muse (Links):

• Let’s start with this great list of world-building questions posted by Patricia Wrede over at the SFWA site, which are meant to help authors create believable worlds for their stories.
• For worlds patterned after the pre-hispanic Philippines, Filhistory.com is a fairly new site that covers Filipino history and weaponry (not just of the pre-hispanic kind). We’ll also be doing a series of posts on pre-hispanic Philippine weapons in our upcoming Talasalitaan segment.

Consulting the Muse (Tips):

• While you’re going through the SFWA list of questions in order to beef up your fantasy world, it would be wise to heed Mary Robinette Kowal’s advice and learn to be specific with culture.
• Fantasy Factor has an archive of articles on such topics as characterization and forms of government, as well as a fantasy name generator.
• The About Writing blog also has an extensive list of links to fantasy writing resources.
• At the Book View Cafe, Vonda McIntyre’s Pitfalls of Writing SF and Fantasy consistently doles out practical, easy-to-grasp advice for writers.
• When trying to appeal to the seasoned fantasy reader, it pays to pay attention to their frustrations with the genre they love, and Limyaael’s Fantasy Rants (here and here) are a good place to start.

Testing the Muse (Prompts):

Think of a trope or a cliche (note: not the same thing) in the fantasy genre which you are tired of, and write a scene (or hey, an entire story) which breaks away from that.

—

While we’re always keen to post helpful links for writers here at Rocket Kapre, we thought we’d devote the Wednesday of each week to a more concentrated form of writing goodness.

WW is an experiment and work-in-progress so please let us know what works for you and what doesn’t in the comments ^_^.