Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

An encouraging word is perhaps the cheapest medicine in the world, at least it ranks right up there with laughter. Somehow, though, it seems that genuine encouragement is one of the scarcest things on the planet. The people that should be able to give it best are often the ones most conspicuously absent when it is most needed.

I’m not even sure how to tally the cost of discouragement. Degrees that don̵...

You can tell a lot about a woman from her hands, or so the saying goes. The internet, being the beast that it is, has taken this one step further, advising us that, for instance, if she’s holding a gun she may be angry with you. No doubt true, but not what the saying was originally intended to mean. They were, I believe, referring more to how much physical labor a woman did, and how much care she took of her personal appearance. In the more modern w...

In Greek and Roman mythology, a lot of the horrifying monsters that the demigods faced off against were little more than overgrown real life creatures made a bit tougher, like the Nemean Lion that Hercules killed, and whose skin he wore as a cloak thereafter. Others, like the Chimera, were composed of various parts of normal creatures stuck together in a random and scary way. Cerberus kind of straddled the fence there, being a giant dog wasn’t good ...

Okay, I am officially sick of vampires, and getting pretty darned close on werewolves. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always loved a good vampire story, from Buffy to Lestat, and when Anne Rice releases another one, I’ll be right there in line to buy it, but if we’re going to delve into mythology, why stop at these?

If it’s shapeshifters you want, there are the selkies that shed their sea...

No one can really talk about modern horror fiction without at least mentioning Stephen King. Even if you are one of the giant mass of people who do not read, and are therefore dead to me, you’ve probably heard of Stephen King. Carrie, Cujo, Pet Semetary and others all made plenty of movie-goers scream in their time.

Readers, on the other hand, are often polarized on the subject. I don’t think there a...

Normal people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about eggs. You go to the store, complain about the price, check them for cracks, and then just shove those buggers in the back of the fridge for the next time you get a wild hair to make cupcakes. I was normal, once.

Then I discovered that I really like breeding animals, and showing them. Goats, horses, rabbits, and poultry are what we show, though it is ju...

Once upon a time, when I was just a child, teachers told their students that man was different from all other animals because he used tools. Then we found that a lot of other animals went for the whole tool-using thing as well: otters, gorillas, birds, even dogs and horses have exhibited some ability to manipulate tools.

So we’ve tried other ways to set ourselves apart, like language. Turns out that at le...

As John Gardner’s incarnation of Grendel said, “Balance is everything.” In writing, it is the balance between action and character or setting that keeps the reader enthralled, perhaps, but real life tends to be a bit more complicated.

I know Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter is a classic, and I’m not saying it doesn’t have its good points, but the man lost me when he went ...

Even when she doesn’t seem to mean it, Anne Rice’s writing is luscious. If she describes places, you ache to visit them. Strangely, this is true even when those places are as familiar as New Orleans, or as unreal as the kingdoms in her Beauty series. I consider this a rare enough gift, but she can also do the same for people. Once a character of hers gets under your skin, they feel like real people, and you miss them once they’ve gone.

Finding a job in the current economy isn’t always the easiest thing, even if you aren’t a writer. There are some jobs that you just won’t find anymore, no matter how hard you look.

For instance, you won’t be finding any listings for a Resurrectionist in the want ads. Just like sanitation engineer is a euphemism for garbage collector, resurrectionist was the 1800’s euphemism for a g...