Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

I have ‘discovered’ that there was a specific formula for creating scary monsters in ancient Greek and Roman stories. Take a creature you already know, make it really big, and toss a couple of extra heads on it for good measure.

Sure, there are a few exceptions, like Medusa (who got the extra heads, snake style, but skipped the super-sizing) or Scylla and Charybdis (which were probably exaggerations of actual ship-wrecking ocean features), but most follow this rule. It makes the legends more exciting if you also include special ‘features’ on your monsters, like acid blood, regenerating heads, etc..

Which, oddly enough, brings me to the underworld. Monsters have a habit of killing people, and dead folks do end up in the underworld, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that this is where I find myself.

If you’re dead, it’s an easy enough place to get into. Slip the ferryman a couple of coins, he’ll pole you across the river Styx, and then you go on to whatever fate it was that you earned in life. For the living, things are a bit more complicated.

Either Hades got tired of losing souls he’d collected, or he really hates solicitors, because he’s got some serious ability to filter the living out of his kingdom. First, of course, you have to find the entrance, and that is no simple task. There is only one, and as expected, it is in the middle of a most inhospitable nowhere.

Unfortunately, finding the entrance is the easy part.

In most legends, the ferryman won’t carry the living, which leaves you to figure out how to cross the river Styx on your own. Of course, if you’re the big, strapping hero type, you could just swim the damn thing, right? Styx, or Lethe, is just a river, and any hero worth his salt should be able to conquer a bloody river.

Except that the tiniest drop of the water will cause mortals, living or dead, to forget everything from their former lives. For the dead, this can be a blessing, as it washes away their grief. For the living? Well, good luck completing your quest if you can’t remember who you are, how you got here, or what the shiny pointy thing strapped to you is for.

To make things more fun, you can’t eat or drink in the underworld, or you will be trapped there forever. Remember good old Persephone? Kidnapped by Hades, so her grieving mother tossed the world into winter? Yeah, well, we still have winter because she ate six pomegranate seeds while she was there, and now has to spend six months of every year as Hades’ bride. That was the deal that a Goddess got, in order to save the mortal world. A run of the mill hero isn’t going to rate squat.

So if you do manage to find the place, cross the river with your memories intact, and avoid eating or drinking anything, you still have to deal with the guardian before you can try to bargain with Hades himself.

If you’ve played any video games at all, you know the guardian is Cerberus, the three-headed dog. Of course, he’s enormous, vicious, and never sleeps, just as one would expect the monster in a myth to be.

But there is a little twist to this story, one that I certainly never knew, nor expected. The name Cerberus derives from the Greek word Kerboros which appears to mean speckled or spotted . If you translate that literally, then big, bad, King of the Dead Hades named his vicious three-headed monster guard dog ‘Spot’.

Somehow, I find the idea of facing down Spot considerably less worrisome than facing Cerberus.

Cheers,

Michelle

The séance has a long history, though of course it has had its fashionable periods, and its shabby ones. I’m always fascinated by the idea of talking to the dead, and I’ve come to realize there are a few basic reasons people really want this to happen.

First, of course, is that they simply miss the person that has died. To have lost a life-long spouse, a child, or a parent, especially without warning, is sure to leave a person feeling hollow, lost without that piece of their lives. For those people, it is all about contacting someone specific, finding out that the person that has left the world of the living is happy. What they want is the realization that their loved one is just fine.

Then we have people that have specific questions to which they want an answer. Questions that for whatever reason, they think only the dead will be able to answer. Maybe this is the result of too many family secrets, or simply of a life cut tragically short, but the human need for answers is a very powerful thing.

The last two reasons we do this could be the motivations for so many other, less savory endeavors: guilt and fear.

How many people are interested in talking to the ‘other side’ because they didn’t bother to talk to the people they’ve lost while they were alive? Or perhaps anger drove a wedge between you. Or some guilt over what you should have done lingers there, burning at a person, until they turn to this option that most of them only half believe in just to get a little relief.

Fear may be the biggest reason of all, though. We seem to be hard wired to fear anything that we cannot see or understand. What fits that bill more than death?

Yet psychologists tell us that within every single one of us, there exists a death wish, thanatos.

So we fear it, but we want it. There isn’t a single religion that I can find that doesn’t try to answer the question of what happens to us after we die. Science isn’t much help, at least not yet, so we turn to philosophical and religious explanations. When those aren’t enough to soothe our fears, then we turn to the only people we are absolutely sure know the answers.

The dead.

Personally, I feel like I belong to a minority group. Curiosity is what motivates us. We wonder if it works, and if so, how?

I’ve seen death, and I do not fear it. I can’t say I want to add it to my to-do list anytime soon, but I don’t fear it.

Still, despite my scientific leanings, my intense curiosity leads me to try many things. The Séance among them. Though our results were less than spectacular, I can say that I did try it. If nothing else, it will be good research for a book someday.

Cheers,

Michelle

In honor of this being the one hundredth blog post on this site, I thought we’d take a look at the cent. Of course, we could start with the lowly copper penny, but I was thinking more along the lines of things with ‘cent’ in them.

We all know that there are one hundred pennies in a dollar, hence the term one cent. Cent comes from the Latin word for one hundred, and it gets used more often in English than you might realize. Not only is it part of our monetary system, we run most of our business and education on the basis of percentages.

Percent was once ‘per cent’ or literally, ‘each hundred’. So if twenty percent of people bought your newest book, then twenty out of every one hundred people would have read it.

Centuries are one hundred years. Centimeter and centigrade involve measurements on the one hundred scale. I could go on, but to me the real question is why we see one hundred as such a special number.

It is easy to see why we might measure things in twos or in tens. After all, most of us start life with two eyes, two ears, two hands and two feet. Fingers and toes come in tens, and that’s where most of us learn to count.

We have a special fondness, though, for doubles. I mean, we take the number seven to be a magical number, both in folk lore and in some religions. So the seventh son of someone was believed to be lucky. If, however, you are born the seventh son of a seventh son, then you are just all kinds of lucky.

Magical formulae are no different, often involving a certain number of repetitions depending on the desired end result. If you need the result to be urgent, or stronger, then instead of say seven repetitions, you may repeat seven sets of seven incantations.

This doesn’t stop with magic, many more mainstream religions use the same formula in their prayers.

Don’t think I’m denigrating any of this, I’m not. Just trying to get to why we as people find this to be important. I have my theories, and since you’ve read this far, I hope you’ll indulge me a bit longer while I share why I think one hundred is so important to us.

You see, I think that we feel ten to be, well, complete. After all, once we’ve got ten things, we’ve run out of fingers to count them on, so we must be done. Ten feels whole. It feels good. It feels finished.

Finished, though, that isn’t good enough for us as a species. Let’s face it, humans don’t settle for having enough, we never have. Why have enough when you can have more than enough? And yet, we all want to be done, even if we can’t quite feel satisfied.

That’s where that second set of ten comes in. If ten feels complete, but we still itch for something more, then surely ten sets of ten will be the completeness we’re actually seeking. Perhaps it is a bit of magic, or a touch of prayer, or just a desperate effort to convince that yawning pit inside us that we’ve actually accomplished something.

Funny thing is, no matter how frustrating it is to try to fill that void, and how much we want it filled so we can rest a bit, it is that same restlessness that drives us to succeed. Sure, it may leave us feeling insecure, and rob us of our sleep, but it also spurs us onward to our greatest achievements.

Cheers,

Michelle

The holiday season is, of course, about a lot more than shopping. That doesn’t mean that we don’t all enjoy giving, and getting, presents. After all, seeing someone’s eyes light up when you’ve found the perfect thing for them can really make your day.

That’s got me thinking quite a lot about the giving of gifts. We do it all the time. Hostess gifts, birthday gifts, anniversary gifts, plus all those holidays that come with their own gift-giving opportunities. Those of you that know me well, might have just realized I switched from presents to gifts. That’s because you know that I’m a little warped, so the gifts that have been on my mind aren’t the kind you typically find wrapped up in shiny paper and topped with a bow.

Nope.

I’ve been thinking about what would happen if you or I had the ability, just for one special day, to endow the people we love each with a single gift.

You’d have to choose carefully, because each gift could only be given a single time. No returns allowed, so whatever choice you made, they would have it for the rest of their lives.

Not neckties, or bowling balls, I’m talking about the other kind of gifts. Telekinesis, speaking to the dead, flight, healing, predicting the future, fire starting, mind reading. You know, those kinds of gifts.

Talk about bringing home the joy and excitement for Christmas!

As fun as it would be to wake up Christmas morning and suddenly find myself able to control the weather or raise zombies, there would certainly be a downside. There’s always a downside. For one thing, I hate the cold, so if I controlled the weather, the temptation to simply do away with winter would be huge, much to the annoyance of skiers and Mother Nature herself. As for the zombies, I fear the neighbors might eventually complain about the smell.

Anyone who has ever done holiday shopping knows that nothing ever comes for free, sooner or later you always end up paying for it, or someone does. Perhaps it isn’t a coincidence, then, that the word gift means poison in German.

Strangely, though, poison isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The same warfarin that kills rats, or humans, carefully given, can also keep a stroke patient alive, or even prevent the stroke in the first place.

Carefully given may be the key here.

I can’t actually give powers, so please stop writing me to ask for x-ray vision. It isn’t going to happen. I do think it is a fun game, though, and a question I plan on asking my family on Christmas Eve. If you could give each person here a single, very special kind of gift, what would you give them and why? Remember you can’t duplicate gifts, and that what you give has to match the person as snugly as possible.

Tradition has it that my grown children will try to talk me into letting them open presents on Christmas eve, even though they don’t actually want to miss the thrill of Christmas morning. Then we have to bargain for what time they get to wake me up for the festivities. The usual first offer is somewhere around 2 AM…when we finally have those details hammered out, it’s time to eat, play games, and ask strange questions till we all have to take that Christmas Eve nap. My shopping may not be complete yet, but at least I’ve found my bizarre question for the year.

Cheers,

Michelle

I’m very fond of Christmas, but it really isn’t my favorite holiday. To tell the truth, except for the flood of sappy and entirely satisfying romance novels that come out at Christmas, I’d have to say it ranks a distant third behind Halloween and the Winter Solstice.

Halloween is the best excuse ever to dress up, tell ghost stories, and watch horror movies, all of which make it pretty awesome in my estimation. It doesn’t hurt for me that both my husband and my son have birthdays in that month, so to me this is the most festive time of the year.

Then, there’s the Solstice.

I know, most people don’t count the Winter Solstice as a holiday, but I do. Heck, half the world probably doesn’t even know the date.

For what it’s worth, the date is December 21st, and it goes by a lot of other names, including Longnight.

You see, the solstice is the time of year when the days cease getting shorter, and swing back towards slowly lengthening again. Naturally, this isn’t going to be obvious on day one, but it means we’re heading back towards spring.

For me, as it was for our ancestors, this is a huge thing. I don’t have to wonder if the food I harvested will last my family through the long winter, and I have satellite information and global warming to reassure me that the world won’t be plunged into everlasting winter, but I still rejoice every solstice.

Part of the reason is that I truly feel like I am solar powered. In the winter, even in a mild winter such as we’ve had this year, there simply isn’t enough sunshine to keep me moving. The real reason, though, is quite a bit deeper than that.

Traditionally, winter is a time of reflection. Cold, darkness, and weather forced our ancestors indoors, leaving them to concentrate on carving, or weaving, or similar creative activities. Winter is the time for evaluating the year you’ve had, and yourself, and planning the year to come. It is a time for introspection, for burying the past, and for creating something new and beautiful.

Solstice then, is a promise. It is a promise that the pain that winter brings, both on a physical and a metaphysical level, will end. Spring will come again, and with it energy and growth. Plans made in the dark months will have an opportunity to come into the light.

I don’t know about anyone else, but that is a promise I need to hear. It’s the reminder that regardless of how good or bad the year has been, a new year will take its place.

So even while I hang stockings, and trim the tree, my eye is on the calendar, counting down to that special day, the day when we head back into the light.

Cheers,

Michelle

Christmas shopping is always a challenge for me. First off, I’m not wild about crowds of people, which is pretty much what you get if you put off your shopping until December. Though I always have the best of intentions about getting started earlier, I never seem to. Then you have the challenge of picking out just the perfect gifts for each of the people on your list, while sticking to that annoying budget that unfortunately can’t just be tossed out the window.

One of my favorite places to find special gifts is antique stores, because nothing there is mass produced or impersonal. Every piece has a history, and that makes it much more personal.

Today, though, amidst the vintage women’s fur hats and beaded gloves, and the cool wind-up tin cars, I found what has to be the beginnings of a horror tale.

Seated at an antique tin table were three worn dolls, each clearly showing signs of heavy play, and each about the size of a two-year old human child.

The first doll was human looking, with a cloth body and a porcelain face. Its eyes stared sightlessly forward, its mouth open in what was clearly meant to be a smile. Unfortunately, with its pale skin, protruding teeth, and vaguely sinister expression, it much more closely resembled an infant vampire than it did a human child.

Seated directly to the blood-sucking child’s left is a monkey of matching size. Its’ too-human face is surrounded with dark, wiry hair marred by bald patches from long ago playtimes. It glares at you, unmoving, with an expression just this side of homicidal. Due to the wear, white stitches show through his fur in many places, giving the impression that the creature has been through a terrible surgery and then repaired by an inexpert hand. As creepy as the face is, though, that’s not all of the story. Unlike the human doll, this one wears clothes: red corduroy overalls with bright green buttons.

Try as I might, I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone had made this ape up to be their replacement child, at the first one’s expense.

Then, of course, there’s doll number three.

A bear, but not one of the familiar stuffed variety. True, his body was the kind of overstuffed brown plush you take for granted in the Teddy Bear family. This one, though, sports a molded plastic face, done in pale pinkish brown. Its blue eyes don’t line up, they stare at different points on the horizon, and with the way that the dolls are posed, it appears to be keeping a single eye trained on each of the others. Its hat might have been meant to be jaunty, but limp and bedraggled as it is, it only manages to be sad.

Then there are its hands. Yes, I said hands.

Bears should have paws. That is the natural order of things. I’m fine with fluffy stuffed bears having arms that end in blunt blobs like good old Winnie the Pooh. That’s perfectly legitimate artistic license.

Giving the bear realistic rubber human hands just isn’t right.

So now, instead of being in the Christmas Spirit, I’m up writing short horror stories about this cluster of dolls I can’t quite get out of my head. That’s one of the downsides to being a writer.

Cheers,

Michelle

Flash fiction is a fairly new thing.

Once upon a time, when I was young, and dinosaurs roamed the earth, flash fiction really didn’t exist. Stories were expected to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that sort of thing takes time.

I have to admit, the first time I saw Flash Fiction, I wasn’t all that impressed. It really is hard to tell a decent story in 500 words or less.

Then, I got to thinking about Haiku.

Yes, the often very Zen short poems that pretty much all of us had to write in middle school. Five syllables for the first line, seven for the second, and five again for the final line. Writing a Haiku is really easy, it doesn’t take long at all. Heck, I could probably write a dozen of them in an hour.

Writing a good one, though, that’s something else entirely.

So yes, the majority of the flash fiction written is as crappy as the Haikus that I could churn out at a dozen per hour. That doesn’t make them worthless, though.

For one thing, writing a flash piece is an excellent way to break through a bit of writer’s block, or to simply warm up for the work to come. Sometimes, even if writer’s block isn’t an issue, you just feel stale, as if none of your thoughts or words are fresh. Grab a random topic, and write a 500 word (or less) story featuring it somehow. It doesn’t even have to be good, the simple act of forcing your imagination into a new track will help the rest of your writing feel fresher.

More importantly, though, writing a piece of flash fiction makes you pay attention to the words you’re using. Unlike Nathaniel Hawthorne in his famous Scarlet Letter, you can’t take two pages to describe a dress. Neither can you afford to leave off the description entirely, though.

Haiku is all about painting an impressionist picture of a moment in time, all with a limited number of words. Flash fiction is the prose equivalent, and although it lacks the scope of a novel, or even a short story, they can still pack quite the punch in their few words.

If you wish to improve your writing, then I certainly would recommend trying your hand at flash fiction. I’ve found it makes my own writing more succinct, though I still prefer the novel. I’ve also found that ideas generated, even in the flash pieces I’ve written that I sincerely hope are never read by another living soul, can be a good springboard into a new piece.

There are any number of contests going on at any one time that feature flash fiction, as well as several magazines that like stories in that length. As they change frequently, simply Google “flash fiction contest” or “flash fiction publisher” and you will usually find quite a few outlets for your work.

Cheers,

Michelle

The best laid plans often go awry.

By now, I should know that, but still it has a tendency to take me by surprise. I’m not sure how, but it still does. In October, I had fully intended to take two weeks off from the whole blog writing thing. Yes, I know October is more than two weeks ago. I did notice that, but time, slippery stuff that it is, got away from me.

Contrary to anything you might read, I am not in fact dead. I took the two weeks I had planned to show ponies at Welsh Nationals, to handle the awards for that show, and to show Boer goats and rabbits at the Tulsa State Fair. Aside from breaking my own big toe by being a klutz, I had a wonderful time. But then things kind of went insane.

The problem with taking two weeks off to show, is that all your other chores back up. I had a novel deadline to meet, and a second one that needed editing. Two family birthdays, both big important ones, and a major cooking holiday. Then of course there is the fact that it is goat breeding season, so all our does have to be bred. Unfortunately, we lost our herdsire to pneumonia after the months of flooding, so everyone got to be bred either by AI or by being driven to an outside buck. Then my ancient Labrador-mutt decided she’d lived long enough, which took the heart out of me for a few days.

I’m not telling you all this because I need a hug, but because this is the way it is for all writers. No, I really doubt that Anne Rice or Orson Scott Card spent any part of the last month defrosting sperm or peering at mucus to determine whether or not this was the ‘right’ time. We face different challenges, but we are still faced with the same 24 hour days and 48 hour lives.

When I realized it had been over a week since I’d written a word, I knew I had to do something. I’m just not happy when I’m not writing, and there were these deadlines looming in front of me. So I put myself on a schedule, and one that might be useful to you.

First, I ditched half of the stuff on my to-do list.

Yep, you heard me right. I was seriously behind, and I cut my list in half. Why? Because I was exhausted, and I wasn’t finishing the lists anyway, so all they were giving me was more guilt. Guilt is tiring, and I don’t want to bother with it. Then I scheduled the writing first. There is one two hour block for my main project, a half hour block for my secondary project, and five five-minute blocks for smaller things. I didn’t think I’d get much done in five minutes, but in the last month I’ve written 10,000 words on a non-fiction piece, five minutes at a time. I’ve finished two outlines and a short story, also in five minute stretches.

After scheduling my writing block, I jot down all the chores I MUST do for the day. This is a farm, so that’s a good chunk of time. Then I block off time for my horses.

Most importantly, I have a small block of time that is mine. I can do whatever it is that I want to do that day in that block and be completely guilt free.

Then I set myself one extra goal.

That’s it. I still don’t always finish everything, but I have things prioritized, and I don’t go to bed before I’ve finished the writing work for the day. So I fell behind, but with this system in place, my productivity has soared in the last month, so much so that by the end of the week I will easily surpass where I should have been without falling behind. Best of all, there is no guilt involved.

Cheers,

Michelle

I don’t want to sound morbid, but death has kind of been on my mind lately. No, intervention isn’t necessary, it’s literary deaths I’ve been thinking about, rather than the more personal kind. You see, as much as death is an integral part of actually living, it is an integral part of telling a living story in many cases. How a character dies, or survives near fatal situations, though, that is what is interesting.

Literary deaths are typically fast deaths. Sure, there are some great pieces of literature that deal with the slow and painful death by wasting away, but by and large those kind of deaths would slow a story line too far to “work”.

Take for example any fantasy novel set in the middle ages. In reality, most of the battle deaths then took place months after the skirmish, from raging infections. Hacking at your opponent like he was a side of meat tends to produce some truly horrific wounds, and these weren’t people that bought stock in Lysol, or took antibiotics, or were even big on the whole bathing thing, so the results were not at all pretty. People then knew this, which is why some knights carried small thin blades so that could stab a fallen opponent, even in a civilized tournament, and grant him a swift death.

Novels generally don’t have time for this, so a man that dies in battle has his skull crushed, or his mount falls on him, or a spear pierces his heart. It’s dramatic, it’s fast, and it paints a much more palatable picture in the mind of the reader than a suppurating wound does.

For the same reason, women that die in childbirth are typically lost due to blood loss, not from the infections that were far more common.

So if you want to kill someone quickly in a novel, and make sure your reader knows they are truly dead, your options are still pretty open. Shooting, especially in the head, is always popular, as is throat slicing, hanging, and drowning. Burning, with or without a stake, is also a popular option, but it can leave the possibility that the body isn’t who you think it is still open. Poison is one of my personal favorites, simply because the wide range of symptoms and delivery systems make it very flexible, but it is less flashy than an explosion, or ejecting a person into the vacuum of space.

I guess the point of all this is that we as readers want death, like life, to have meaning. If a character that we hate, or love, dies, then we want to see it as part of something else. Sure, your villain may have just broken the neck of a village girl over nothing more important than spilled wine, but her casual murder shows the villain’s true character. If that same villain were to trip over his cat, fall down some stairs, and break his own neck, the death wouldn’t satisfy the reader. Yes, he’s just as dead as if the plucky hero stabbed him through the heart with the dead girl’s bread knife, but it just doesn’t feel the same.

Cheers,

Michelle

While I have been unsuccessful in locating the original author, there is a piece of advice floating around the internet that I think is worth exploring. According to this gem, we should all have three hobbies. One hobby should generate money, one should be good for the body, and one should be creative. Most days I figure I can’t afford another hobby, either in terms of time or in the actual cash it would require. I suppose if I took up normal hobbies, like knitting, it might be less expensive, but I just don’t see that happening.

t is really easy to figure out how much something costs, determining how much it is worth is considerably harder. These hobbies are no different. For the first time in recorded history, we will actually be making a profit raising goats next year, assuming that nature cooperates with us at all. I can provide receipts for how much this endeavor has cost me, but showing you what it is worth will be much more difficult. Both of my children are dedicated, hard-working people with the ability to solve problems, and it is at least partially because livestock is so very good at causing problems that need to be solved. The time spent with them, the babies delivered, the buyers satisfied, the memories involved, all those things have a value. What about the exercise that I probably wouldn’t have had without them? Or the comfort I’ve taken from them when I needed it? If you’ve had a bad day, nothing will take the sting away faster than a lapful of baby goat, trust me.

Even before it turned an on-paper profit, raising goats counted as my money earning hobby.

Good thing, because raising horses is not really a money-making endeavor. The old joke isn’t far from the truth: “How do you make a small fortune with horses?”, “Simple, you start with a large fortune.”

They aren’t profitable, but they are great exercise, especially if you have more than one. Of course, I could substitute any other blood-pumping hobby here: basketball, soccer, swimming, hiking, you name it, really. The thing is that this is the one I can’t live without, to the point that at an age when taking up knitting might have been a saner choice, I’ve decided to both breed horses and take up jumping. It’s possibly an insane choice, but it works for me.

It’s that last hobby though, that I’ve been struggling with. You see, I’m a writer. That’s what I do, and who I am, but I don’t consider it a hobby. Anything that takes time, quite naturally has to take away from something else you’re doing, unless you’ve found a way to multiply the number of hours in your day. If you have, shoot me an e-mail, I’d love to learn your secret.

I was reluctant to add anything else to my routine, simply because I felt like I would be shorting other things that I valued. Writing is creative enough, right? Well, this bit of advice kept nagging at me, so I finally ran a little experiment, and began using 30-45 minutes at lunch time for art. Seriously, I would have probably wasted this time flitting about the internet anyway, so what did I have to lose?

Strangely, five pounds, and a lot of negative emotion.

The art is interesting enough that I ate less and felt more satisfied, and it lets you express whatever the heck you feel like expressing at the time without any strings attached. Novels are creative, but you can’t just start murdering characters in a romance because you’ve had a crappy day, nor can you let your evil necromancer have a wild fling with a wood elf based on your own mood, it just won’t fly. The other benefit I wasn’t expecting was that my word count increased and my time decreased, I’m guessing because I’d essentially ‘primed the pump’ at lunch.

Just an idea you might want to try.

Cheers,

Michelle