a possible idea is having one school being able to summon the spirits of the dead, and having a council of fallen kings whose only job it is to choose [or if they screw up dethrone] the current king. of course seeing as the current council were all picked they'd all have qualities the older members of the council liked and when they joined the council they would pick those qualities in the new king. since they would be dead they'd be able to watch all possible candidates schooling and moral ability.

Another possible idea is to have a prerequisite of being able to rule a major territory is to rule the minor territory that your family has there seat in. so if a major house ruled the duchy of x but had there city in the barony of y, the ruler would be a duke while the heir would rule the barony with equal rank to all the other barons in the duchy. in a similar way the council of fallen kings would only pick those who have proven capable of rule, so the old king would have to give his chosen heir the chance to rule the duchy of his family seat. this rule shouldn't be set into the constitution or anything becuase if all the dukes were incompetent there'd have to be other options, but it should still be a common tradition.,

and of course the fallen kings would prefer there family, allowing dynasties, but those of fallen dynasties would be on the council, acting as a limiting factor.

The other thing that annoys me is when a book cover completely contradicts a character.  Why would you put someone in skimpy clothes on the cover when the main character is more at home with jeans and a t-shirt?

someone, somewhere decided sex sells. I wonder if the producers of game of thrones know the difference between a masterpiece and a porno. ugh.

personally i don't mind romance in books that much. I don't buy the books specifically for the romance, but I can ignore it fairly easily enough.

I'm getting sick of all of these april fools jokes.

my technique is to desisng a world, its history, etc. etc. and then pick an interesting part of that history and expand it for a story. so for me its kind of blurred.

time travels a difficult theme when it comes to writing. Look at how David Eddings uses it. dreamers last book . Limited minipulation of time is fine if its not too powerful though.

That entire story seems to be very heavily based on the df. For example using the title "the merlin". I'd suggest you review your work and change a few things here and there.

Or maybe using a staff or other item could be less dangerous eg if you lose control of the magic the staff would blow up instead of your hands. Another idea could be that an item is easier to use [maybe requiring less concentration] or reduces the risk of something going wrong.