Erotica, fantasy, and horror writer.
Not only did ancient peoples look to the night sky’s constellations as cultural touchstones, they also looked to individual stars. The star Thuban helped the Egyptians align their pyramids, and Sirius, when it rose at dawn, let them know the flooding of the Nile was soon to come. The stars of the Pleiades star cluster …
Brandy’s eyes could steal a sailor from the sea.
A Wrinkle in Time by Madelene L’Engle Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010 (Originally published in 1962) [Challenge # 3: A book you loved as a child.] Like many children of a certain generation, I read Madeleine L’Engle’s classic SF novel A Wrinkle in Time in fifth or sixth grade and fell in love with it. …
In a pre-industrial society, stars and constellations had more impact on the viewer because there was less light pollution. Pictures could be traced, paths, and stories, all providing a commonality among members of a tribe or society. One common example is the constellation of the Big Dipper, or Ursa Major, imagined by many ancient cultures …
They are coming for you and you can’t hide from them… ever. (Art by Alexey Andreev)
There are all sorts of fairies, elementals, grues, demons, devils, angels, nature spirits, and the like in fantasy. Often they serve a purpose in the story, and just as often they are there for window dressing, like the offhand mentions of pookas or kelpies causing trouble. In fact, things wouldn’t be the same if …
The Cult regularly punished those who failed to recruit new members.
Fantasy writing published in English-speaking worlds relies heavily on Medieval England as a setting. I suppose it’s because most early fantasy writers were, in fact, English, and then there’s the influence of the Inklings that included J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. It’s a heavy base that has only gotten heavier over the …
Black magic was one of her passions. Over time, she found the blackest. (Artwork by menton3)
So many of them sound like video games, don’t they? Probably because both are designed to take their users to a strange, disoriented world full of action and violent motion. With a dozen lists and a randomizer, here’s what I came up with, to create your own travelling carnival or Midway. Nausea-inducing fairground rides …