Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

Just for fun, I wanted to give everyone something free they could enjoy. So here's this stunningly inaccurate hororscope you can definitely use.

Aries: Due to the angle of the moon, you'll find that working toward your goals is effective today. Of course, this might actually have nothing to do with a celestial hunk of rock, and everything to do with hard work. The moon, however, is gorgeous, so it is going to ho...

This is a question that comes up pretty much every time I tell someone I'm a writer. Well, either that or some variant of "Couldn't you get a real job?".I wish I had a brilliant, simple answer, but the fact is, I don't. Every time someone asks me, I feel like they've asked me why I breathe, but I'm going to try, one more time, to explain my compulsion.

The one thing non-writers seem to understand about my job is...

The search for intelligent life in the universe isn't a new thing. Stand up comedians have been using it for years right alongside NASA scientists and science fiction authors. What is new is the sheer numbers of actual planets we've been able to locate using modern technology, especially the Kepler satellite. Yes, the theory that with trillions of stars in the universe, some percentage of those would have to have planets, and some percentage of those plan...

The first time I saw an authentic Victorian era death photograph, I have to admit I found it rather creepy. Not because it was a photograph of a dead baby, I can certainly see why you would want to remember your child in any way you could. The thing that I found disturbing was that the dead baby was being held by a living child of no more than three. If you're at all familiar with photography from that era, you know how long that little boy was sitting th...

It isn't possible to cover the entire subject of evil, not in a novel, and certainly not in a blog post, but I would like to take a look at what literary people consider to be "evil" and how that works, especially in science fiction and fantasy. There really isn't room here to cover all of that, either, but the concept is troubling me, so we'll touch on it as best we can.

Of course, classically evil is associate...

I wish, given the title of this blog post, that I was using it to announce some victory of my own. Every author probably feels the same way as they are waiting for their first literary offspring to make its way into the world. Publishing, by necessity, isn't a fast process, and I am not a patient soul. No, I'm not resting on my laurels while I wait, I have two other projects currently in development, but I did find myself very curious about another publis...

Nature is not a gentle soul. It has its moments, don't get me wrong, but overall nature is pretty darn vicious. Look at any wild or feral population, and you will see that it is nearly always at war of some sort. Competition for mates, food, and nesting sites is fierce, and occasionally fatal. You may also notice that the hostility of nature has produced in many species the desire to form groups. In some cases this instinct is so strong that it can actual...

Although we might not wish to admit it, we are all creatures of habit. Some habits are obvious, and serve a necessary evolutionary function, like sleeping at night. Even in an age where the world is never truly asleep, most of us tend to sleep at night and work during the day. Biologically, we're optimized for this behavior. Our eyes really function best with full daylight, at night we tend to lose at least some of our depth perception and our color visio...

Although it was a long time ago, I did my initial schooling in biochemistry, Genetics to be precise. I had a low-level job working in plant pathology, sequencing DNA and even slicing and dicing DNA to add interesting new bits to the plasmids of E. Coli bacteria in order to attempt to add those same genes to corn. Why anyone in their right minds would let a 17 year old kid tamper with nature completely unsupervised is a question I really have no answer for...

One of the more popular archaeological sites often used as evidence that aliens visited earth are the Nazca lines. If you aren't familiar with these, they are a series of enormous line drawings known to scientists as geoglyphs. Literally, a geoglyph is an earth drawing, where the medium for the art is the earth itself, but specifically in the same style as a drawing or painting. So Mount Rushmore, although on a grand scale, is not a geoglyph, while the gi...