Yeah, I'm back. I've been on in the past few days fairly frequently. Nothing to add to the collection, I'm afraid, buuut, there might be an up-and-coming set of EPIC NOTES for my book soon. A few excerpts of it, here and there. Oh, and character sketches. I've been courting this book, on and off, for the past eight years, and now I'm back in business again. Every new obesession, fascination, gives me ideas for characters to add to this mix. At first, it was almost entirely the cast of LOTR, but now Stargate: Atlantis and Heroes have given me ideas, as well. This isn't fanfic, nor are these thinly-veiled caricatures of other people's work. Rather, it's kind of like "imagine a fantasy world where it would be cool if (insert name of actor/actress here) from (movie/show) was playing a (insert name of fantasy creature here)". So, I have an idea of how these characters look, but how they act and the situations they get in are purely mine.

Hey, if Anne Rice could be inspired by Antonio Banderas, for Servant of the Bones (at least that's what I remember her saying), there's no law against doing this.

I'm trying not to make my mythology resemble that of The Dresden Files or the Hollows series (two urban fantasies that I've read some of), but when you're dealing with wizards, some parallels can't help but be drawn. I think one of the fundamentals of any fantasy series is to get your mythology down and established, then stretch your rules later, but not break them. Stay consistent with what you write, or people will be confused, and man, will they ever nitpick and bitch. Again, I cite Anne Rice, whose work was fairly consistent in her first few vampire novels, then strayed more and more from the mythology later (I haven't read all of them, but I know this to be true from the ones I have read, and from a friend who's read them all.) She went waaaaay out there, and got a lot of flak.

That's why it's important that I have notes, and they're going to be up for all to see. Keep me honest, everyone.