Monday, February 14, 2022

Making Myths and Magic: A Field Guide to Writing Sci-Fi and Fantasy

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Making Myths and Magic is a practical and well written guide to writing genre speculative fiction presented by Shelly Campbell & Allison Alexander. Due out 18th Feb 2022 from Mythos and Ink, it's 404 pages and will be available in hardcover, paperback, and ebook formats.  It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links. I've really become enamored of nonfiction ebooks with interactive formats lately. It makes finding information again so much easier without having to flip around in the book looking.

This reminds me in all the best ways of a good writing workshop with concrete, logically prepared, and well presented useful advice for the craft of writing, aimed at writers (or would-be writers) who wish to concentrate on speculative fiction. The authors tie-in numerous different media (film, printed fiction, popular culture, etc).  There are relevant writing examples throughout the book which will hopefully help would-be SF/F writers to hone their craft. The authors have included chapter notes and attributions with external links and references which I found very helpful.

Four and a half stars. This was really information dense, fun to read, and very useful. It reminds me a lot of a well run writing workshop with a particularly effective teacher (or in this case, two).  I would recommend it to beginning writers (there are good takeaways here for all genres, not just speculative fiction). It would also be useful for more structured group workshops or classroom use, writer's groups, and similar. 

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

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