Traci Ashbe Dark Epic Fantasy Author

I gang, Craig here today. I had some of this conversation in the blog comments somewhere, and don’t remember where. Doesn’t really matter, it sparked my idea for today’s post.

I recently finished the draft of a fantasy novel, and will probably have started editing before this goes live. One of the things about a tale like this is the large cast involved. Believe it or not, we tend to wind up with a lot of characters that sound a lot alike.

There is some good advice out there about combining these characters and reducing the cast to a degree. It’s always worth looking at your story through this lens. There are times; however, where this isn’t the solution, or maybe you just don’t want to.

My tale is a pirate tale. In reality it took hundreds of men to operate one of the tall ships, particularly when manning the…