Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

The word for the day is journal.

No, this isn’t one of those words that you have to learn to pass some standardized test. If you play any kind of adventure style games, you’re probably familiar with the term and its many uses already, but bear with me for a moment.

The humble journal is a gold mine, not only for historians and gamers, but for everyday peopl...

I’ve just spent the last three weeks teaching STEM classes to disadvantaged students in a summer program all throughout the Tulsa metro area. I have to say, it was equal parts incredibly awesome and incredibly sad.

For those that don’t know, STEM classes are Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathmatics based classes designed to give students a good basis in the technical fields and encourage them...

Backstory is one of those hot button topics. You know how you don’t want to mention politics around your uncle Joe, or religion to those nice young men in suits riding their bicycles through town? Well, you should probably avoid mentioning backstory in a room full of authors unless you really enjoy being stuck in the middle of a long and heated argument.

I can sum up the camps for you pretty quickly.

The player piano was once the mechanized entertainment wonder of the world. Despite the fact that it had neither strobe lights, nor a disco ball, and that it cost a small fortune in the money of the time, everyone wanted a player piano.

Modern people probably wonder why they even bothered. After all, the thing could only play the delicate paper reels you’d bought for it, and each boxed song was larger than...

Value is a very funny thing.

We love auctions and estate sales, partly because we love all the interesting and quirky things that people have collected over their lives, but also because we love a good bargain. Part of the fun of auctions is that no two people see the same thing as a ‘bargain’.

Box lots are often the most interesting.

Summertime brings a lot of things to a farm, but one of my favorite things is the giant piles of vine ripened tomatoes. I can eat them plain, dry them, turn them into salsa, and a ton of different tomato sauces pretty much until Summer drifts right into winter.

Rarely do I think much about the plant, though.

Which is weird, because I love herbs and alchemy, and tomato...

It is 105 degrees outside with a heat index hovering somewhere above molten glass.

This isn’t really anything new, just the joy of high Summer in Oklahoma. As far as my reading list goes, it has had its influence, though. I didn’t break out Dante’s Inferno to re-read, but I have started reading a non-fiction account of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression entitled The Worst Hard Time, by.

Although I tend to digress more often into interesting finds of science and archaeology, I actually intended to primarily write book reviews on this site. Obviously, what I intend, and what ends up happening, often don’t even bear a passing resemblance to each other, but that doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned the idea entirely.

Top of my list of ‘old’ books to review is Richard Adams nove...

One of the most iconic cinema moments of my childhood was the moment E.T., the mislaid extraterrestrial, taps his friend Elliot on the chest with a glowing finger, admonishing the child to “be good” before he steps back onto his spaceship and heads for parts unknown.

That phrase has been used by parents on their offspring for generations. Loving parents, neglectful parents, abusive parents, teachers,...

There is something universal in the hoarding of treasure. Of course, the image that leaps to mind is a dragon, curled around its mountain of questionably attained gold decorated with only slightly bloodied armor, one emerald eye cracked open to guard against intruders.

Hoarding though, isn’t just about the gold. In fact, we hoard some pretty weird stuff.

I knew a...