Writing Fantasy Heroes: Tyrion

It’s Writing Fantasy Heroes week here so I thought I would chip in with my two cents worth about one of fantasy heroes I have worked on recently. I’m going to use Tyrion, one of the two main characters in my ongoing High Elf trilogy, as an example. This process of developing Tyrion was a little different from creating a character from scratch, since Tyrion already exists as part of the Warhammer universe. What I’ll be talking about is how I put flesh on his bones and hopefully turned him into a well-rounded and complex character as well as a believable hero. Read more…

Writing Blood of Aenarion (Part Four)

I am sometimes an idiot. Last time I was talking about how I came to the solution of how the Elves of Ulthuan figure out N’Kari’s plan. I fully intended to discuss that in this post then I realised it was, in fact, something of a huge spoiler so, apologies if I got your hopes up. I won’t be doing that today. Instead I shall  talk some more about the process of writing  Blood of Aenarion. Hopefully I will get to the end of this saga before this series of posts becomes longer than War and Peace.  Having solved most of Read more…

Writing Blood of Aenarion (Part Three)

So there I was trying to decide whether to junk yet another opening. If you’ve read the book, you already know I didn’t and you also know why. The solution to the problem was pretty simple. It had already been established (in Daemonslayer, for example, and in the Daemons of Chaos book which was causing me so much trouble) that daemons can return from the dead. You can’t ever really kill them, only destroy their body. When this happens they are banished from mortal reality for a time until they can take a new form. All I needed to do was Read more…

Writing Blood of Aenarion (Part Two)

After realising I was going to have to start all over again, I read and re-read the descriptions of the twins conflict with N’Kari and considered my options. This was not going to be an easy story to write. As things were stated it took place at the Shrine of Asuryan. There were no encounters between the twins and the Keeper of Secrets prior to that point as the daemon rampaged around Ulthuan slaying the heirs of Aenarion. I realised that this was going to be a difficult tale to structure because the heroes and their main antagonist only meet Read more…

Writing Blood of Aenarion (Part One)

Sometimes a book goes exactly the way you always thought such things would back when you were a kid dreaming about being a writer. You get to visit glamorous, exotic locations, eat great food, lounge around in your pyjamas (or your swimsuit) and do exactly what you would do back home, only patting yourself on the back about how lucky you are and how excellent your choice of career was. Writing Blood of Aenarion was like that for me. I got an email from my agent about writing the Tyrion and Teclis trilogy late in 2009. It was an exciting Read more…

Another Blast From The Past

Here are some more mad ramblings from the recently rediscovered files of Wilhelm of Praag, strangely still relevant to the Tyrion and Teclis Trilogy. (I would like to thank Jimmy Carmine for pointing me in the direction of archive.org in the comments to the previous Blast From the Past). I should point out that this comes from my old website, was written over 10 years ago and was never part of the official background anyway. Still bearing all that in mind, let us proceed! The Paths of the Old Ones Some Speculations on their nature by Wilhelm of Praag. Recently there fell Read more…