The Lord of the Rings trilogy is pretty awesome.  Game of Thrones, perhaps even better.  For fans of epic fantasy, these efforts represent the culmination of what we love about the genre, everything that pulls us in whenever we pick up a new novel or sit down to play Dungeons & Dragons with our friends — the drama, the politics, the darkness, the sense of danger and wonder and excitement and the discovery of worlds that can only exist in the imagination.

But not every effort to bring epic fantasy to the screen have been nearly so successful.  In fact, it’s safe to say that most of them were pretty awful…and yet we love them anyway.

It’s hard to say why epic fantasy translates so poorly to film, but it seems that much of what feels so sweeping and serious in the personalized experience of reading a novel comes across as a bit…

by Autumn Birt

Where story inspiration comes from, or even just the bits that make up the plot lines of an epic story, surprises me. Life infiltrates a writer’s mind and somewhere in the subconscious becomes something extraordinay.

I’ve written here about how a painting inspired the town of Mirocyne in my epic fantasy trilogy the Rise of the Fifth Order. On my blog, I’ve written about how a leadership course altered my view of quest groups. Everyone getting along for a common goal? I think not. Someone is going to crack or have a different motive or get into a fist fight over their beloved facing danger. Stress and facing death rarely results in lasting cohesion.

In the last post, Chantal mentioned how nature and tribal settings inspires her writing. Steven Montano has posted some great pictures from outings that inspire him with new fantasy ideas. And…

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Smashwords is kicking off its sixth annual Summer/Winter promotion!

Here in the Northern hemisphere, it’s mid-summer.  Readers everywhere are loading up their e-reading devices for summer beach reading and vacations. But what about the good people South of the equator, who are now in the middle of winter? They deserve to curl up in front of the fireplace and enjoy a good read too! That’s the story behind the Summer/Winter promotion!

You can check out all the amazing books on sale here. Check out all the fantastic authors and discover a new book to love.

If you are here and already have a fondness for members of the Guild… well I have great news! We’ve joined the sale. See the links below. And happy reading!

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Blade of Amber

Revenge is the whetstone for the Blade of Amber in book 1 of the Woern Chronicles! Start the adventure for…

By A.M. Justice

How much backstory should I spoon feed my readers?

I belong to a large online writers’ critique group, and I see this question posted almost weekly. Every fantasy and sci-fi writer in the group hops on the thread and gives advice; time and again, the consensus can be summed up as follows:

• Weave background information and world building into the narrative
• Avoid data dumps of historical details
• Under no circumstances put the backstory into a prologue

These days, prologues have about the same cache as mullets. They might once have been cool, even sexy, but now people just shake their heads and turn the page. I don’t care for mullets, but I do think prologues can serve as a useful gateway to a story (I used one to open Blade of Amber). So long as the first sentence (or paragraph) hooks me, I don’t care whether…

by Autumn Birt

Here on the Guild of Dreams, we’ve written about common fantasy tropes quite a few times. But I think one trope we haven’t covered yet is villains. Specifically, that villains are always evil, especially in the fantasy.

It is simply a fact of life. There are the heroes who must struggle against evil. Why?

Sure, I could get philosophical that we as a species are constantly searching for a way to simplify the problems faced every day. And nothing is simpler, or more validating, than good versus evil. So of course, stories are crafted to follow this formula. And it is a formula. One of the oldest.

But there is so much more…

What makes a villain evil? That she/he will stop at nothing to achieve a goal? What if that goal is necessary to save the lives of friends or family? That is a lot less…

by A.M. Justice

Over the past year or so, I’ve had several conversations about diversity—or the lack thereof—in fantasy. Opinions on this issue can be roughly divided into two camps:

1. There’s a lack of diversity because authors “write what they know” and naturally create characters who resemble themselves
2. There is plenty of diversity in fantasy; you just have to read the right authors

Diversity in fantasy falls along a spectrum.

I love every series shown here, with the two on the ends vying for all-time favorite. Nevertheless, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings sits pretty far to the left on my scale: all the protagonists in LOTR are white and all but Eowyn are male. George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire and Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series fall in the middle of the spectrum. Both series include roughly equal numbers of male and female protagonists as well as supporting…