Category: Fantasy

Of Mist and Shadow [Review]

Of Mist and Shadow by Jenna Wolfhart Self-published, 2022 This was the second of the Romantasy books I read. The book starts off similar to a YA novel: “I’d been born to fulfill a promise to the fae king. It was an ancient promise, bound in powerful magic. I was sworn to serve his every …

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An Heir Comes to Rise [Review]

An Heir Comes to Rise by C. C. Penaranda Lumarias Press, 2021 This book was one of a bundle I got for free – five romantic fantasies, all of them self-published, clearly some sort of cooperative deal between the authors — it was advertised on the r/fantasyromace subreddit.They all seemed typical of what’s available these …

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Sleeping Beauty and the Beast

Since so many of the current Romantasy crop of novels involves variations or inspirations from the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, here’s another mashup… in AI this time. The originals are here and here.

The Turkish Wizards of Love

I had to include these outtakes from my Wizard of Love series. They’re hilarious!

Worldbuilding Wednesday 2/14/24: Love Magic

Since it’s Valentine’s day, I thought I’d do a list of spells and magical items related to love, or its lack. Caution, a few of these are NSFW! The fellow above is from Starry AI’s “pinup” art filter. The prompt was a variation of “bearded wizard with arms raised, a cloud of valentine candy hearts, …

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The Romantasy Explosion

Since we’re nearing Valentine’s Day, let’s talk about… Romantasy. As implied by the name it’s a mashup of Romance + Fantasy, a subgenre exemplified, perhaps platonically, by Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series, whose eponymously named first book came out in 2015. Marketed as YA, the fantasy novel was about a …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 2/7/24: Classical Greek Names (Female)

I covered Greek female names before on this site,  in this post about female centaurs. For that I drew on actual, lesser-known names from the myths of Ancient Greece. But since I had researched so much for that, how difficult would be to generate some in a completely random way? So, you need a Greek …

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Crown of Starlight (Chapter One) [Review]

Crown of Starlight (Chapter One) by Cait Corrain Everybody’s been talking lately about the publishing scandal involving debut author Cait Corrain and her fantasy novel Crown of Starlight, so I thought I’d put in my opinion. The whole story is here and tells it more eloquently and completely than I can, but the gist is …

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