Sabrina's Blog

This past weekend, I was asked to speak to the members of a local writing group about the business side of writing fantasy. That is to say, the group's members wanted to know about the market, what publishers are the best, and which agents to seek out. It turned into a pretty good presentation, and while anyone can find this information with a little research, it can be overwhelming for new writers, so I thought I'd share a little of what I covered here. Back when I was new, I would have loved someone to lay it out for me. The Fantasy Market What we hear: The Fantasy Market is over-saturated. Is it true? Yes and no. Fantasy does seem to be the go to genre for aspiring authors. They believe that it must be easy since they can just make up whatever they want, when in all actuality, fantasy is much harder, takes more time, and requires more skill, IMO, than setting a story in the world that already exists. A fantasy writer first has to put in hours upon hours of ...

Since the second book in my Award-Winning Fantasy Romance series released last week, I thought I'd center this week's magical creatures post around the race of the hero: the Manticore Origins : Persia, originally called Martichorus Appearance : Head of an old man with a long beard, body of a lion, scorpion tail, dragon wings, and sharp claws. Legend : This beast is said to be a man-eater that lays in tall grasses so it's beastly body is hidden and only the non-threatening image of it's human head is visible. When humans near, it pounces on them, devouring them in one bite, or shoots stingers from it's tail, rendering them helpless while feasts on them. Despite having the head of a human, the beast couldn't talk, but rather had a trumpet sound for a voice. Disappearances were often blamed on this fierce creature. The Gate Keeper Chronicles : In my series, the Manticore people look a bit more human. They  have lion eyes and thick, lion-mane...