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.
Category: Fantasy
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, …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 12/6/23: Magic Spells of Ancient Greece
Curse tablets were a cottage industry in ancient Greece. Spells embodying the caster’s desires were written on plaques of stone, clay, papyrus, wax, even thin sheets of gold. Then, to reach the gods, they were thrown into wells or buried with the dead (often without permission from the dead one’s next of kin.) It’s likely …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 11/29/23: Magic Items of Ancient Greece
Greek myths were chock-full of magic items, most of them made by the gods; and with a few exceptions, most of the humans who meddled with them came to a bad end. Take the tale of Jason and the Golden Fleece. It’s a very long and involved one, but the gist goes like this. Disinherited …
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