In the 1980s the Russians made their own version of The Hobbit (unauthorized — copyrights, shmopyrights!) for TV. It is not so big budget, but the acting is delightful. I particularly like the baby crocodile Smaug.
Tag: Fantasy
Tolkien Month
Sauron’s forces on the move It’s Tolkien Month here on my website! A little odd considering I have been writing mostly erotica and horror, but my roots are in SF and Fantasy. Reading E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, a progenitor of Tolkien’s and a probable influence, has made me appreciate the good professor even more. …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 2/21/18: Birds
Astranci, by Caelicorn It’s pretty easy to name a new species of bird. Their beaks and tails adhere to certain shapes, and body parts such as eyes, breasts, and wings share certain features also. Their habitats name them, as well as their food, calls, and mating behavior. So if you want some fictional avian or …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 2/14/18: Great Romances
Guinevere’s getting ideas Sometimes, when writing fantasy SF, or some mixture of both skewed sideways and viewed through a mirror, a writer likes to be clever and insert some obviously intentional fictional replacement for a real-world person, place, or thing. For example, Poppy Z. Brite’s novella Plastic Jesus was about a 1960s rock band called …
New story in Beautiful Lies, Painful Truths II anthology
My short fantasy story “The Unchosen” is featured in this anthology from Left Hand Publishers, under my other writing name of Trece Angulo. You can buy it here from Amazon.com. “The Unchosen” was a story I had been planning to write for ages. Like many writers of my generation, I’d been entranced by Anne McCaffrey’s …
The Dinosaur Lords [Review]
The Dinosaur Lords by Victor Milán Tor Fantasy, New York, 2016 I bought this book for my cousin, thinking it was grimdark fantasy by the cover, perhaps set in some He-man barbarian milieu like Robert Adams’s Horseclans novels, but with dinos as the mounts. Before I sent to her, I thought I’d read it first. …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 1/24/18: Useless Magic Items
(Artwork by Dchan) There are those magic items that are very helpful to a character, and those that aren’t. Here are some that did not make the grade into regular adventuring use. Useless Magic Items Ashestes’s Garrulous Ass: Renders an ass or donkey capable of speech. Unfortunately, the animal doesn’t stop talking for the …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 1/17/18: Germanic Names
Returning to Ruritania, Germanic names, and fictional European countries again… There are really a lot of them, evidenced by this list on Wikipedia. I was blown away, actually. Some highlights: Animation has its share, evidenced by the fictional country of Cagliostro, in which Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, Hayao Miyazaki’s debut anime movie is …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 1/10/18: Germanic Towns
Wouldn’t you like to live here? (Art by John Stevenson) Fantasies set in Germanic cultures, like those based on Italian ones, have not been published much in recent years, yet in past decades there were enough of them to have their own subgenre: Ruritanian Romance. These novels were set in imaginary Central or Eastern …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 1/3/18: Mythic Animals
Kirin-Sleipnir-Dragon-Butterfly thing Mythical animals include the unicorn, jackalope, sea serpent, hydra, sasquatch, and many others… such as these. All randomly generated by me for inspiration and to get your creative furnaces going. Mythic Animals Yauzink: An aquatic lion with webbed paws, fins, a fish’s tail, and a mottled green and brown coloration. It is …