It’s not just for making book covers and posters — If you’re a budding science fiction and fantasy author and want a little more skin in the game, why not create your own artwork? Of course, there are sites like Fiverr or Upwork where you can hire someone to the visual stuff for you but sometimes a little bit of…

Here’s what they know and the information they’ve got on you is indeed quite “revealing” — I am an absolute fan of Pornhub Insights. No, not Pornhub (although I am honest and I will admit that I myself, more often than once, have clicked my way to this particular website and its contents for a variety of reasons), but rather, Pornhub Insights. What is that? You…

Surprise, surprise. Jane Austen’s contemporaries were quite the filthy lot. And you guessed it, humans and porn go back a long way. — Meet Thomas Rowlandson. Artist, caricaturist, cartoonist, and pornographer. Also, social commentator, satirist, and lover of women, drinks, and gambling (often indulging in all three at the same time). In other words, he was a late 18th Century to early 19th Century party boy with a talent for drawing. …

From 23,000 BC to the 21st Century — Nude carvings and paintings have always been a feature of European art. Right from the moment Stone Age hunters learned how to carve rock and ivory or how to shape clay and fire it to produce little statues with surprising detail, the female nude — whether meant to inspire, titillate…

Science fiction and fantasy world-building tips for the budding writer — Science fiction is full of flying jellyfish. From the giant space-dwelling, shimmering blob in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Encounter at Farpoint to the seemingly organic UFO in Nope, it looks like if you wanted to make something truly alien — rather than a man in a rubber suit —…

A chromatophore-based non-verbal language — I came up with the Undine language (and no, my undines are very different from the water nymphs of European folklore) because I wanted to create a language that was: A.) written using logograms, B.) non-verbal, C.) “spoken” by non-humanoid entities and D.) “spoken” underwater. Undines are non-humanoid elementals with…

A Study in Arcane Symbols — It is said that the first human to completely decipher the High Fae glyphs, so ubiquitously employed in fairy magic, was a certain Signore Collino Scarlatti. …

Latest stories — An Introduction to the Grammar of High Fae A Study in Arcane Symbolsmedium.com How to Use Canva to Create Stunning Science Fiction and Fantasy Art It’s not just for making book covers and postersmedium.com Alien Linguistics Constructed languages in science fiction and fantasymedium.com

A book so raunchy, it was banned for centuries — In 2017, a British university actually removed a 270-year-old novel from a reading list for students taking a literature course there. The novel was supposedly dropped “for fear of offending students”! You don’t say! “Offending students”? Even those jaded millennials? What could possibly offend a generation used to having adult-only…