Susan and John Ruff, Fantasy Authors

Category: Uncategorized

  • One Hundred Words to Defeat Writer’s Block

    As authors, we all know that our craft is part inspiration and part discipline. Inspiration is the fun part — those wonderful ideas and words that flow into our heads when we are writing, daydreaming, walking, or doing absolutely nothing. We all love it when just the right phrasing or…

  • What’s New at the Cove?

    Somehow, despite pandemic malaise and wildfires’ haze, the authors at Emerald Cove Press are making steady progress on the next two anthologies. (And, all joking aside, I think I can speak for all of us at Emerald Cove when I say our hearts go out to those affected by the…

  • 99 Cents for a Filched Fish

    My sixth grade teacher once asked the class what grade we thought he should give each of us for a particular assignment. I was a straight-A pupil at the time, but trying to be humble, I responded that my assignment deserved a C. When the teacher gave me my first…

  • Making an Old Story New

    Back in the early 1990’s, before self-publishing was common, before I even owned a cell phone, I wrote a fantasy novel called Feast of Five Crowns. I dutifully attempted to get my manuscript published in the old fashioned way. The rejection letters I received were very polite. One publisher told…

  • Travel and Fantasy World Building

    Like all works of fiction, fantasy stories revolve around characters and plot. However, in a fantasy novel, the world itself can also be a major part of the story. A good fantasy book sweeps the reader into another realm, perhaps a place of enchantment or magic, maybe a land of…

  • Those Little Formatting Oddities

    I love books. I love libraries. I love bookstores. That beautiful paper fragrance in a second-hand bookstore is a wonderful thing. When I was a kid, in addition to visiting our local library, my family would occasionally drive to downtown San Diego to visit the huge public library. It was…

  • Critiques During a Lockdown – Part 2

    As I discussed in a prior blog post, writing during this current pandemic should be easy. We’ve all got so much extra time at home now. For someone of my…ahem…mature age, the “shelter-at-home” lifestyle means that I am pretty much in front of a screen all week. Loads of time…

  • The Problem with Prologues

    If you’ve read 60th Hour, you may wonder why the first chapter takes place twenty years before the rest of the story. In a book that focuses on time, why have that outlier right at the beginning of the book? The astute among you (who read the title of this…

  • Our Next Exclamation Mark Anthology

    When Emerald Cove decided to try its first themed anthology (Kidnapped!), I expected all our stories to be similar. After all, we were writing on the same theme. To my mind, kidnapping stories followed a standard structure: a person is abducted, often for ransom, and the story revolves around what…

  • To Sequel or Not: One Writer’s Dilemma

    If you want your characters to live happily ever after, you’d better be cautious about writing a sequel. Case in point. The Star Wars movies. The end of the Star Wars trilogy back in the early 1980’s was a joyous moment for the heroes of the story and their fans…