These are some really excellent fantasy essays I've recently come across. She talks alot about things people do wrong in writing, such as cliches, impracticalities, way too cool major characters etc. She has an amazing one on marrige, which has helped me so much in recently writing a romance (eep!) She deals alot with language, like the difference between a good amount of description vs. way to much "violent purple" description. For ladies, who usually tend to write female characters, she has lovely rants on making the females believable, and not "Awesome-because-I'm-a-WOMAN-and-women-just-rock-my-husband-shall-BOW-to-me!" characters which make me cringe. I just disovered her a little while ago, but her rants have helped a lot.
I have to put in a few warnings, though. She has some profanity, not a ton, but she tends to atriculate annoying things people do with, well, colorful language. She's not a Christian, and while she doesn't ever bash Christians, (the only thing coming close is a part of a rant telling people to stray off the beaten track and use a different religion other than Christianity in basing their world's religion off of) it shows in some of her rants, though for the most part I think she is very good at not letting her own views on religion cloud the rest of her work. And if you want to, just skip her rants on religion.
Oh, the site. Right. Here: http://www.livejournal.com/tools/memori ... filter=all
Check it out!

Oh I've read these! They're really good!

I read several of these awhile back and they certainly did make me think much more deeply about fantasy than I had in the past. I have to agree that they're insightful, but I also have to agree with your assessment of her language. Simply put, it's ATROCIOUS. I personally did not let it bother me at the time and still occasionally will read one or two of her rants, but she's profane, bottom line. That is the main reason that I've never suggested her rants on this site. Also, there are several cases where she encourages blurring the line of morality with relative ease. Some of her advice has helped me greatly in the past, but I would warn all Members and Guests that this advice comes with a pretty strong odor. I'm glad the two of you benefited from Limyaael's articles and do not condemn either of you or even the articles themselves, but for the most part many of Limyaael's Rants are antithesis of the goals of this site, to encourage the writing of uplifting and God-glorifying fiction.
In Christ,
Jordan

You're definitely right. I'm sorry, I tend to blur the line of Christian writing and just writing, so I put these out there because they're great for fantasy writing in general. I definitely need to be better about keeping what I put on this site strictly pertaining to Christian writing. Sorry.

No apology necessary. But for a Christian, there shouldn't be much of a difference either way As Christians our goals should always be to glorify God with our writing, regardless if that writing is specifically targeted towards a Christian audience or not. And let's face it, the last thing the world needs right now is more books that blur the already severely blurred line between right and wrong I'm not saying that we have to write worlds where good and evil are perfectly distinguishable (our own world certainly isn't like that), but by the end of the book the reader should be able to tell the difference between the characters' right choices and the wrong choices. I do agree that many of Limyaael's articles do point out some very unique ways to avoid writing cliche fantasy, but they also offer some ideas that probably are best avoided whether you're writing Christian fantasy or fantasy for nonbelievers. Remember the old admonition to be in the world but not of it .
 I've actually considered at points writing up summaries of Limyaael's Rants for this forum without the language in it. But it would be a pretty daunting project since she's written so many. Even though some of her rants (like the ones on sex and gay characters) would not needed to be dealt with, there'd still be alot. It would basically involve going through each rant and summarizing Limyaael's main points and suggestions, that way people can still benefit from the ideas without having to deal with the original wording. Also it provides the opportunity to comment on any ideas that you feel might be a little borderline. For instance, in one rant she suggested that since wolves in the wild commonly mate with siblings or even parents, that maybe in a society of wolf-shapeshifters would be ok to marry siblings since it's not wrong for wolves and they spend part of their time as wolves. Ideas like this are not necessarily "bad" per se, but they do kinda blur the line of right vs. wrong to an extent that followers of Christ would be wise to avoid. And in a summary of these suggestions, there would be the freedom to point out the "iffy-ness" of ideas like this while still presenting the helpfulness of the other ideas. You wouldn't be at all interested in possibly helping with such a project would you? It could provide some very helpful material for other HW members.
In Christ,
Jordan

That would be really awesome! We might have to ask permission, though, but I think she's been inactive for a while. Anyway, it's not as if we're planning on selling anything. That's a great idea!

She's been inactive for nearly 5 years and the consensus of some research on my part is that no one on the web knows what happened to her. But anyways, since we'd be writing reviews and not actual copies of her work and would be attributing credit for the ideas to her I think we should be pretty well covered. And to be on the extra safe side, we'd include a link to the original with a disclaimer about language. That should satisfy any of the plagiarism police that might come across our work