Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

Faster than light travel, when you really, positively need something before yesterday.

I know, it’s a fantasy most of us want very badly. It’s a mainstay of science fiction, and all those movies make it seem like just a minor thing. You know, the captain says “Ahead warp factor nine”, and the audience just says, “Huh, that’s pretty fast.”

I don’t write poetry. Considering that I want to make a living writing, this is probably a very good thing. Poets have never been very high on the income scale, though at one time it was very much ‘in’ for the wealthy to write poetry, or at least have a poet that they supported on the side.

Unless you count song lyrics, there isn’t a huge modern market for poetry. Those places that do acc...

Language changes as society changes, it has to in order to reflect the ideas that people want to express. One aspect that has me quite curious is the role of gender in language. You would have to be living in the Himalayas without internet access not to be aware of the push toward accepting those in the non-standard gender or sexual orientations as perfectly normal human beings. Although it has nothing to do with language, I’m all for accepting peo...

Like a lot of people, it was Tolkien that first introduced me to runes. His, naturally, were the basis of the language of the elves, and quite a few fantasy authors have followed suit. Various series have had runes of power or protection, runic languages, runic shields. I think, though, that it is the real runes that fascinate me the most.

Runes form the Viking alphabet, and runestones are often the equivalent o...

Writing is a scary job. I can say that with impunity. I’ve raised two kids, trained a good number of horses to ride, and jumped out of a perfectly good airplane. All those things were scary as hell, but in some ways, writing has them all beat.

Now that I’ve ditched the day job, half the world seems to want to “become a writer”. I could be wrong, but what I think they really want is to fin...

Words aren’t static, of course. They evolve over time, the meanings gradually shifting with the generations, or sometimes, a word gets appropriated by a cause, event, or company, and its primary meaning can shift virtually overnight.

One of my favorite examples of the gradual shift is the word sinister. Sinister is, even without its history, a perfectly wonderful word. That snaky repeated s just makes it s...

Tragedies, both major and minor, have occurred over the centuries, but for me the saddest are the burning of ancient libraries. I know, loss of human life is terrible, but the simple fact is that human lives all end. It’s just the way the game is played. I’m not saying I like it, but it is one of the drawbacks of being alive.

Ideas, however, should be immortal.

Today, I’d like to take a few minutes to rant. Please bear with me, but I cannot be the only person out there that feels this way. It’s okay, I promise this will have very little to do with anyone’s gender choices, political agenda, or what flag they are or are not flying.

Content.

It’s the endangered species we don’t talk about, the eleph...

As far as literary mental diseases go, schizophrenia is the go-to guy. Not quite to the level of amnesia in soap operas, but it’s still a wildly popular disease for your villain to have. Where amnesia gives the soap opera writers a chance for a Mulligan on an entire story line without having to resort to an alternate universe hypothesis, schizophrenia provides authors with a host of useful traits in a villain, while still being able to portray them ...

Secrets are the stock in trade of any writer. Mystery writers aren’t the only ones that need to keep their audiences guessing, we all want to be surprised, to find that thing that is hidden. Writers, however, have a vested interest in eventually letting their audiences in on whatever secrets they’ve been hiding.

What if you needed your secrets kept?

For cen...