Fantasist’s Scroll

Titles come easily to me.

Maybe it has something to do with the way I was introduced to creative writing back in the Fifth Grade, but titles have always been easy for me. Our teacher used to put up titles on the board and we had to write stories that were based on that title. So, I often find myself starting with titles long before I have any real story. Sometimes, I just sit and toss out titles for projects I know I’ll never have the time, energy or motivation to produce, just because the titles can be fun.
Here are a few examples you can steal for your own work:

Carpet Bagger: The Adventures of a Damn Yankee in the Deep South
Flashbacks to a War I Never Fought: A Divorce Memoir
Amber Waves: American History seen through a bottle
Hack: A Writing Life
Hot Wired: Erotic Tales of Cyberspace
Dangerous Curves: A Scholastic Romance
The Wizard in Blue Jeans
The Man with a Limp

So, now you’ve got titles, what’s your excuse for not writing?

I’m always looking for new twists on old themes.

And, frankly, the whole “alternate Earth” thing is a very old theme. But, I have to admit, it’s one that I can’t get away from in my own head. One of the alternate Earths that I contemplate on a regular basis is an inverted Earth. An Earth with its North and South poles swapped. I guess it’s an idea that grabbed me when my mother told me that people think at some point in the future, the magnetic core of Earth is going to, well, flip and send all our compasses out of whack, among other things.
Well, apparently, I’m not the only one who’s fascinated by this. Chris Wayan explores it all quite fully on a page titled Welcome to Turnovia.

Check it out.

I don’t want to give away the ending, but lets just say that the greedy Esperantists with their evil plans for world domination and the abolishment of true artistic conlanging get their just deserts.

Okay, seriously, I doubt that the creator of Conlang: The Movie is still looking for comments as this is pretty old. Like this post, which sat languishing in my queue on this blog, it’s more than a year old now. Still, if you’re a conlang enthusiast, it’s worth seeing the little movie.

Oh, and you may be wondering why I’m posting a year old movie on this blog. Well, because it’s slowly grinding to a halt. I’m just not that focused on writing fantasy any more and, frankly, my time is being spent elsewhere. I may eventually redo or update this entire site, but not until after I have cleared my own personal creative queue of projects and that is probably going to take some time. However, there are a few old posts here that I always intended to clean up and share, so that’s what I’ll be doing. After I run out of those posts, however, I’m going to just pop up a note letting anyone who stumbles across this site that it’s gone dormant. In case it’s not obvious.

So, until then, enjoy!

Today is William Gibson’s Birthday!

For those of you who have been hiding under a rock for the past twenty years, or have been freshly cloned, William Gibson is the primary progenitor of the cyberpunk movement. He’s generally credited with coining the term “cyberspace” and popularizing a somewhat more realistic, if somewhat bleak, view of the future.
He also ran away to Canada in 1968 to avoid the draft. Which is the only bad thing I can say about him. I otherwise admire his work and thought processes. Certainly his literature is beyond compare. I admire his work very much and occasionally will reread some of his short stories, just to capture the feel of his prose.

Anyway, celebrate his birthday with a little science-fiction in thanks for what he’s done for the genre.

Today is the birthday of novelist and critic Anthony Burgess

He was born John Anthony Burgess Wilson in Manchester, England on this day in 1917. Though he had written several novels early in his career, none of them were particularly successful. His career took a different turn, however, when, in 1959, he began to suffer from severe headaches and was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The doctor told him he only had one year to live. The diagnosis turned out to be incorrect. However, Burgess wrote five novels in that following year, the year he believed to be his last.

Though he wrote and edited a large body of work, including a fair selection of non-fiction, he’s best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange, which is perhaps most famous for the slang language he invented specifically for that work, called Nadsat.

Today is the birthday of Kurt Cobain.

The singer-songwriter who essentially founded the “grunge” music movement, was born in Hoquiam, Washington on this day in 1967. He started from humble beginnings, working a job as a school janitor, but he started playing in local rock bands. He spent most of this time living at various friends’ houses and on the street, even occasionally sleeping under a bridge. In 1989, he and his bandmates saved up six hundred dollars to record their first album, Bleach, under the name Nirvana. The boys signed to a major label in 1991 for their next album, Nevermind, and Cobain was shocked when it sold more than 10 million copies.

He became internationally famous almost overnight, but Cobain hated being famous. He developed a heroin addiction that got worse and worse, and on April 5th of 1994 he committed suicide at his home in Seattle.

Today is William S. Burroughs‘ birthday.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri on this day in 1914, he is best known for having written Naked Lunch, which was later turned into a movie that starred Peter Weller. Burroughs started writing while attending Harvard, but when a piece of his was rejected by Esquire magazine, he was so disappointed that he didn’t write again for six years. He tried to enlist in the military, but he was turned down by the Navy,and when he got into the Army infantry, his mother arranged for him to be given a psychiatric discharge.
So, at 30 years old, he moved to New York City and got involved in a bohemian scene. It was there that he was introduced to two younger men, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He also got addicted to heroin, and wrote his first book about it, a memoir called Junky. It came out in 1953.
Burroughs is known for his somewhat random method of writing inspiration, which he called the “cut up technique“, though he was certainly not the only writer at the time to make use of the method.
Burroughs is also famous for having accidentally shot his wife at a party while recreating the infamous “William Tell scene.”

It’s the birthday of the man who brought us Conan the Barbarian, King Kull, and Solomon Kane science fiction author Robert E. Howard, who was born in Peaster, Texas on this day in 1906. If you’re from Texas, or just passing through, you can find out more about him at the Crossplains Robert E. Howard Museum. If you can’t make that, you can read more about him at the Wikipedia.
Sadly, he chose to end his life early via suicide by .38