How mysterious and scary is your monster? If your monster were to come to life and get lost in your town, would people’s hair stand on end when they saw it? Would they stop whatever they were doing and run from it? Would it cause them to fear for their lives? How do you make…
How much pain would you be willing to endure to be thought of as beautiful? To what lengths would you be willing to go to ensure that you were thought of as sexy? How much trauma would you be willing to put your feet and your body through? For me, wearing high heels isn’t safe…
Snow is beautiful when it first falls. When its pristine whiteness covers everything, it creates a gorgeous winter wonderland. Unfortunately, it has to melt, and when it does, the beautiful winter wonderland turns into a dirty mess that is not pleasing to look at. Sposh, soft slushy mud or snow, is one of the words…
Like any writer of horror, I have a desire to create a monster that will have people trembling in their seats. I have been researching how to do that. Thinking up a monster should be easy, right? Well, in a way it is, but if the readers don’t think your monster is believable, you will…
What does the sparkly glitter that covers a lot of Christmas cards and various arts-and-crafts projects have in common with kudzu, an invasive ornamental plant? We can thank Henry Ruschmann, a New Jersey cattle rancher, for the invention of glitter in 1934. When not working his ranch, he dabbled as a machinist and discovered a…
There is a word for every condition under the sun. What word describes the inability to feel pleasure? How much do you love books? Are you a bibliophile, bibliomaniac, or a biblioholic? Do you have bibliomania? Have you ever had the desire to eat grass like an ox? Have you ever gone temporarily insane? Been…
What words do you use to describe your character’s habits or traits? Does your character enjoy good food, drink, and other luxuries? Or maybe your character is a mean, sneaking coward. Even though your character is an adult, does he act like a spoiled brat? A bon viveur is a person who lives high and…
When you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, are you caught out in a rainstorm of shoes? No, you are waiting for something to happen, something that you expect to happen. But what does waiting have to do with shoes? For the answer to this, we need to go back in time to manufacturing…
Have you ever seen a troupe of acrobats perform? Can you hear a pound of carpenters as they work on your house? What about the pint of Irishmen you met last night in the bar? Do you think you will see them again? How often do you think you would find a catalogue of librarians…
If you had lived during a time when people had no clue what was happening during a solar eclipse, what would you have thought when the moon covered the light of the sun and everything went dark? Why would you think the sun had disappeared? Would you believe that a frog or toad was eating…
