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...

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, especia...

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 En...

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 gift...

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 i...

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 toss...

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 s...

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.

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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.

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 kni...