MONDAY

“But it’s true, Ms. Chaison!” Jason Rule flung up his hands in one of his trademark dramatic gestures. “Everyone knows rotting meat just naturally grows maggots!”

“Oh?” Adjusting her glasses, Lauren Chaison pointed at the terrarium holding the rancid pork chops Jason and Kat had been assigned for the experiment. “It’s been a week, and I don’t see a single maggot in there.”

The Storm of Ages dominated the bachelor wing of the Home of the Gods, driving even the most testosterone-ridden weather-god indoors for poker and tankards of divine mead. Esephus, God of Gladiators and Falchions, disliked bloodless gambling, and so wandered over to the scrying pools. As usual, he was armed to the teeth. A cluster of deities who had bet their last burnt offerings stood by, watching one of the more interesting wars and shouting at the occasional brilliant maneuver.

As writers of speculative fiction our job is to tell a story that transports the reader to a new and exciting place. To accomplish this, we must establish a relationship of trust and, more exigently, arouse the reader’s curiosity as to what will happen next.

As writers, we have only one tool to accomplish this: language.

In his book, The Death of Metaphor, Desmond Egan-- one of Ireland’s greatest contemporary poets-- laments the decline of English prose, decrying it as ‘decadent and lazy’. Egan points his finger directly at the tendency of modern writers to replace transitive verbs with the verb ‘to be’ as the greatest cause of this decline.