Yet another small business brochure would be saved from the evils of pedestrian design aesthetics (which to designers is an oxymoron), and the world would be a better place. It's simple, really. Hope this clears everything up.

Actually I don't think it's evil, I think it's lame. To me what it says is, "I am so DARING for using this clever font! To further make my creativity clear, I will also pick fuchsia for the font color and teal for the background color, and liberally distribute apostrophe's throughout the message I am sending you, which is invariably nothing more important than a chain letter."

but oh some of you probably love it and now you hate me. sorry.

now, when it comes to the written book, the best font to use is a serif font, bookman old, courier new, times roman, etc are all great fonts for books imo...

however, when talking about on a computer screen it all depends on the images surrounding the text, or for subtitles the same, i find Comic Sans to be particularly useful as a font for OSDs (on-screen displays, as in the volume control on your tv)

Most people who write fantasy don't know what magic is, or where it comes from. (Card is an exception. He knows, very well, what real magic is and where it comes from.) Real magic comes from people, it is a way to interact with the universe about us on a very personal level. Real magic is subtle, not overt. Authors who understand this will write works that are as close to immortal as it is possible to be.

I recently posted the first thirteen lines of a story that has no overt fantasy beyond the fact that it occurs both in the present day and approximately seventy five years ago. That makes it a fantasy. Everything else in the story is very much "real world."

If you have a dream, and the insights from that dream change you and your life, that is magic. If you have a traumatic experience, and it changes you forever, that is magic. If you meet someone and fall in love, and they eventually fall in love with you, that is magic. In the first two instances, you worked the magic upon yourself. In the third, you had a partner, and together wove the spell that entrapped you both, forever.

I assume you've read Tolkien. There is very little overt magic in the story, and what there is sounds like a highly advanced technology. Is there anyone who would not classify LOTR as fantasy?

Alternative history is sometimes classified as science fiction, sometimes as fantasy. What you want to write is simply a story set in an alternate universe very much like ours. What do you care how it is classified?

Good stories are about people, and people are definitely fantastic, by one definition or another. If you write a good story, the marketing types, the pigeon-holers, the type-casters, button sorters, accountants, and lawyers will force it into a classification. That doesn't matter. What matters is that you do the magic of writing a story that people will read, enjoy, and perhaps learn from. Go thou and commit magic. ;oD

And if you haven't already, read Joseph Campbell, especially *The Hero with a Thousand Faces*. I think it will set your mind at ease about what you want to do.

He said that books are in themselves spells. They're magic really, you can take down this scroll off the wall, open it and understand the thoughts of a man who has been dead for two thousand years.

He went on to elaborate and say a bunch of other crap but that was the interesting part.

Apparently one time when she was teaching Spanish, she spent almost the entire class time on non-Spanish related subjects, then looked at her watch and asked how they'd managed to waste so much time, and that was the reply.