Avon Van Hassel

Building Worlds and Filling Them With Magic

It’s a hallmark of humanity to mourn and honour our dead: all cultures do it, they have done it throughout time. Here, in the west, our trends have changed a lot over time, and some of the ways we did it in the past may look foreign to us, now, but it’s really the same …

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Worldbuilding is one of the funnest parts of writing fiction. If you’re writing in the real world, the geography is easy, but if you’re inventing a new world, you have to consider a lot more things. One thing that is impossible to overlook for carbon-based (organic) lifeforms is water. There is no human civilisation that …

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Ahh, a nice cup of tea. What could be more soothing than gentle perfumed steam rising from a tasteful china cup to warm you on a rainy day or accompany a good book? It’s almost hard to imagine the turmoil that went into making it. You can’t make a cup of tea without something reaching …

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If you’ve read Golden, you’ll know that Lady Johanne loves her garden. In her story, her husband’s physical absence during the war and emotional absence at home drove her to find a distraction, ending up with a passion for gardening. After the war and her husband’s death, she moved herself and her daughter to her …

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Travel is fun. You get to see interesting things, meet interesting people. And some places are special because of their relative location on the map, the fact of being place markers, or because of just how hard it is to get to them. Many of these places have traditions surrounding them, but the ones we’ll …

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Treasure Island is a classic for a reason. It has so much: high seas adventure, salty sailor talk, sailing ship vocabulary, a desert island, buried treasure, even a talking parrot. SO MANY pirate story tropes come from this book, the creativity boggles the mind. You all know Long John Silver already, the sea cook with the peg leg who is charismatic, charming, and treacherous. There’s also the good doctor, the hot-headed country squire, and the innocent widowed-innkeeper’s-son-turned-cabin-boy-in-search-of-adventure, Jim Hawkins.

Ahh, the holidays. These days, at least in my household, it’s all Christmas carols, holiday movies, baking stollen and cookies, and frantically wrapping presents so they’ll look nice under the tree. That’s not too unusual. But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the origins of Christmas and winter traditions, and how it’s all changed …

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