Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

I mean no disrespect to my Catholic friends, but I have to admit the few times I attended Catholic services in my youth, I found them deeply disturbing. Not that there is anything wrong with the religion, it was the statues everywhere, looking at me. I have to admit, I've never even liked dolls, so it was probably far more something bizarre in my head than any fault of the sculptors. As I got older, they bothered me less, but I never could quite shake the...

While I generally want to focus on the whole world of fiction, rather than just my own material, I am pretty excited about some upcoming progress and wanted to share that with everyone.

First, my novel Demonologist is finally at a publisher being reveiwed. While this is a long process, often taking six to twelve months, it is still progress.  Sending your work out is not unlike sending your kids off to scho...

  I have to start by saying that I've been a little overloaded with vampires in the last couple of years. I'm not saying I don't love Lestat, because honestly who wouldn't? Just that the market has been rather saturated with that particular theme song. From the violent to the sparkly, undead blood drinkers have been featured in both fantasy and paranormal romance very heavily. Partly this is because one idea inspires another, so authors produce more o...

Most of the novels of any genre that I fall completely in love with have the power to surprise me, not an easy task given how much I read. In honor of Harry Houdini's birthday today, I thought we could take a quick look at a man that was simply chock full of surprises, even literary ones. Born in Hungary on March 24, 1874 as Erik Weisz, Houdini's name would come into household use for his seemingly impossible escape acts. Magic, stage prescence, and fanta...

There are times in the life of every creative person when they find themselves staring at a blank page, canvas, or whatever, simply stuck. Generally this isn't because they have actually run out of ideas, it is because everything they can think of to do feels as though they have done it before. For writers, This is the dreaded "Writer's Block" and there are dozens of ways to overcome it. One of my personal favorites is called Box Dancing.

 I have to admit, when I first saw the headline that oricalum ingots had been discovered in a shipwreck, my first thought was of Skyrim. Orichalum doesn't even sound like a real thing, it sounds more like the comic book metal "Unobtainium".  Or perhaps it should be the metal from which all orc weapons are made in Middle Earth. Then a number of people decided that the presence of these bars of metal was conclusive proof of the existence of Atlant...

Blogs often turn into personal confessions, sometimes spiraling down into places no one in their right minds wants to go. I certainly hope that's not where this is headed, but I do have a confession. I've been struggling lately with how to define "irresistably attractive" for a project I'm working on. Yes, I generally write Fantasy, and occasionally Horror, but that doesn't mean that I don't have to write a compelling romance from time to time. Fifty Shad...

Spring forward, Fall back. We all know the drill, but no matter how much we manipulate our daylight hours, there never seems to be enough time. Lives are busy, time is short, and something has to give. Unfortunately for writers, what ends up 'giving' is often time to write. 

There are a million books on how to manage your time, and I seriously don't think I can outdo those resources in a single brief blog p...

  There are several reasons to review an author's work, not the least of which is that many new authors just need a push of sorts to become household names. Sometimes the reviewer wants to ride the popularity of a book or author, driving up their own content  by talking about something that everyone either likes or hates. Sometimes, and this is my favorite reason, the person writing the review simply can't get a book out of their heads, and wants...

There are some horror fiction mainstays that never fail to please. Chief among these is the all-purpose zombie. From the pathogen spewing post-apocalypse zombie, to the undead brought back by voodoo priests, Zombies have been gracing screens and pages for more than sixty years. Nature, as usual, is several steps ahead of us. To once again prove the phrase "Truth is stranger than fiction", I thought I'd share a few examples of actual zombies in the natural...