What's in a Title?

A hat worn by princes of the Holy
Roman Empire as well as princes of
Belgium.

In fantasy worlds, there is prone to be a specific form of government. In this government there is prone to be nobility. Said nobles are either going to have regular titles or special titles. These are the regular titles, with the feminine in parentheses. Not all of these are required.

• Emperor (empress)
• King (queen)
• A king's widow is known either as the queen dowager or the queen mother.
• Grand Duke (grand duchess)
• Grand Prince (grand princess)
• Basically the same as a grand duke; the heir to the throne.
• Archduke (archduchess)
• Infante (infanta)
• Basically the archduke of Spain and Portugal, this is any child of the king that is not the heir to the throne.
• Duke (duchess)
• Prince (princess)
• Marquesse (marquise)
• Margrave (margravine)
• Count/Earl (countess)
• Viscount (viscountess)
• Baron (baroness)
• Freiherr (freifrau)
• A German baron or baroness.
• Baronet (baronetess)
• Hereditary knight
• Ritter
• Equal to baronet and hereditary knight.
• Knight (dame)
• Nobile
• Edler von
• Austria-Hungarian and German.

If you make up your own titles, you will have a more difficult time. Remember good old Gramir of the Wicked Death? If your titles sound anything as ridiculous as that, you need to change it immediately. You may laugh, but your readers will upon seeing your ridiculous titles. Hierarchies among the titles are important; I suggest creating names of titles that correspond to the titles given for real life feudalism above to keep it a little more realistic. If you deviate too much, it may seem either barbaric or overly complicated.

Feel free to post the names of your titles and what they correspond to here so that I can adequately judge.

THE Fantasy Cliche

Vorpal swords: good for
killing jabberwockies, not for
your fiction.

This plot is basically the synopsis of everything wrong to do when you're writing fantasy. If anyone does this, I will personally go to their house and make them apologize for writing such a travesty.

A hero lives in a land that eerily resembles medieval England if medieval England were romanticized and otherwise inaccurate. There, he is a poor farm boy just trying to raise money from his family. Meanwhile a dark lord with a name like Gramir of the Wicked Death comes back from the underworld where he came and is seeking revenge. Gramir or one of his goons kills the farm boy's family, and he mourns. After he mourns, he decides to avenge. He finds an all-powerful sword that once belonged to either the greatest hero of this land's history or the strongest god in the pantheon (there's only one religion, and it's polytheistic). Behind the sword there's an elderly mentor that tells hero the truth; that wasn't his real family, and he's prophesized to kill Gramir. The mentor teaches little that the protagonsit needs to know and then dies. It doesn't matter how. The protagonist feels as if he will fail, but keeps going. Meanwhile, the king's daughter (always blonde and pale) is captured by Gramir, but the hero is on a long quest and doesn't know. As the hero travels he meets a handful of interchangable but awkward sidekicks. When the protagonist faces Gramir, he throws away these sidekicks (who would be perfectly useful as human shields, in my opinion) and takes out his sword. Despite the fact he barely knows how to hold it, he kills Gramir because of the power that the sword holds. He finds the princess and takes her back. Her parents know that she's betrothed, but they get married because he saved her. It ends with a lavish wedding where the groom is offered large sums of money for what he did, but he refuses, saying that it's only for the honor.

The End

Irish Names

The flag of the Republic of Ireland. Most
Irish names have Celtic origins.

For this blog, some posts will be generic ideas for names per nationality based on what I find interesting. Since I am an overwhelming Hibernophile, it's simply natural that I start with Ireland. As you can tell below, I like wolf names.

MALE

• Conaire - "wolf herder"
• Conall - "strong as a wolf"
• Conan  - "wolf wisdom"
• Conn - "wolf reason"
• Connor - "wolf"
• Conri - "wolf king"
• Criofan - "fox"
• Faolan - "wolf"
• Fionntan - "fair hawk"
• Phelan - "wolf"
• Shea - "hawk-like"

FEMALE

• Ainsley - "one's own meadow"
• Aithne - "fire"
• Alyson - "noble"
• Brenda - "raven"
• Brenna - "raven maid"
• Bridget et al. - Goddess name (Brid)
• Erin - "peace"
• Fianait - "deer"
• Kiana - "soft, synthetic material"
• Moira - "the great"
• Morrigan - Goddess of magic name
• Riley - "valiant"
• Rowena - "white hair"
• Whiltierna - "wolf lordess"
• Yvon - "archer"

SURNAME

• Murphy - "sea warrior"
• Kelly - "warrior woman"
• O'Sullivan - "Grandson of Sullivan"
• Walsh - "foreigner, Welshman"
• O'Brien - "Grandson of Brien"
• Byrne - "Descendant of Bran"
• Kinsella - "Descendant of Cinnsealach"
• O'Connor - "Grandson of Connor"
• O'Neill - "Grandson of Neill"
• O'Reilly - "Grandson of Reilly"

A note on surnames: The prefix "Mc" or "Mac" means "son of", while the prefix "O'" means "grandson of".

Fantasy Cliches that Aren't



Without adequate character description,
your character may be a Lego brick.

Sometimes people create lists of fantasy cliches that they can't stand, and yet some of them aren't really cliches if you can make it your own. Here are some examples:

• No apostrophes in names. I sometimes put apostrophes to indicate another pronunciation. In one novel that was eventually scrapped, a character had the name "J'akal". This was to prevent his name from sounding like "jackal", but rather "juh-akall."
• Urban fantasy with vampires, werewolves, or zombies. This is a big possible cliche, depending on how you treat it. Vampires are portrayed either as haunted romanticists in paranormal romance and bat-like heliophobes. Werewolves are portrayed as muscular, courageous that become half-wolves under the light of the full moon. Zombies are portrayed as lurching, brain-devouring corpses. If you can find a way to make a vampire, werewolf, or zombie that doesn't fall under one of these categories, you're safe.
• Fantasy in medieval England. If you know how to portray medieval England with the utmost realism, I find nothing wrong with this. It's only when you start making it incorrect that I have a problem.
• Made-up names in fantasy worlds. I actually have the opposite problem; I can't have an alternate world where peoples' names are still "Joe" and "Bob".
• Describe your character as little as possible. I find this absolutely ridiculous; don't spend three pages talking about what it looks like, or break from the action to do it, but I at least want to know what the character looks like. It's not good enough to say "man" or "woman".
• Don't make up your own religions. In an alternate world, nobody's going to know who Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, or Siddhartha Gautama is; you need an alternate religion. Similarly, some people say not to create too many religions, but think of all the religions in our world.
• Don't make your own language. If you can make it sound like an actual language, and you can conjugate the verbs in this language by yourself, that's fine. If you know anyone skilled in linguistics, get them to help.
• Don't have everyone speak the same language. In most of my work, societies have their own primary languages, but educated adults know an IAL.
• No prologues. This can usually prevent a first-page infodump. In one of my scrapped novels, the prologue told the story of a battle between a goddess and an invincible lord, as she decides to take him to another world to defeat him there. On the first page of chapter one, a new character is introduced that turns out to be her.
• No taking from mythology. Greek/Roman are overdone, and Egyptian is coming up on this. I'd like to see more Celtic mythology integrated (who wants to be the first to create a YA series about Celtic demigods?), as well as Mesoamerican and Middle Eastern.

If you can find a way to make these your own, they're fine. Otherwise, stay away from the original voice.

Basics

This is a space opera. This is not
what I want you to write.

Someone will read what you write. This is guaranteed. They may not like what they read, but they will pick it up and read it. They may not even crack the book open, just look at the back, but this counts as reading.

That being said, my goal for you is to make sure that they do more than just look at the back and decide that this work is horrible. My goal is to help push your writing over the top. I can't guarantee that you'll be a bestseller. I can't guarantee that people aren't still going to look at the back and decide that it's not what they want to read. That will happen anyway.


Part of that is title, which will be discussed later, but that's beside the point. I want your writing to be something that is recommended to a reader's friends as one of the greatest books of all time, not just another space opera or fantasy novel about an orphan boy who discovers that he has mystical powers and gets the girl in the end.

My goal is to get you to create art.