10 Questions for Women

The following 10 questions are from my Coffee Table Philosophy book, 101 Questions for Women.

Books I and II in the series can be found here and here.

10 Questions for Women:

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Feminism 

A cultural way of existing everyone should embrace?

An over-simplified method of pitting men and women against one another?

Or a concept you personally don’t put much thought into?

No Dating Until You’re 50

 What is the most valuable life lesson a mother can teach her daughter?

What about her son?

Explain the differences, if any, in the lessons you’d teach one or the other.

 The Matriarchy 

Suppose you were queen of the world and everyone in it.

Name three cultural/ideological changes you’d put into place.

Global Fight Club 

In your opinion, are men inherently more violent than women?

If yes, is it due to:

The environment we live in?

Testosterone?

Human instinct?

If women were, on average, physically stronger than men, would they be more violent than men?

But will he take out the Garbage? 

Whenever you meet an attractive man for the very first time, what is your first and most instinctive thought?

 The Few and the Many 

Imagine the world will end in five years.

The government’s plan is to construct one spacecraft for each family. Each ship can hold a family of four. The ships will fly to a nearby star system and drop you off on a habitable planet.

The problem: You and your spouse have four children.

 Stay on earth and wait for the end? Leave two kids behind?

Or convince your spouse to send the kids alone without you?

Back to the Beginning 

In your estimation, for how many years after your death will the memory of you and all that you’ve done linger in the world?

In other words, considering the way you’ve lived your life, how long will people remember you?

What about the residual effects of knowing you? How long will those last?

Consider that the lessons you taught others might be retaught…forever.

The Laminated List 

Imagine you and a significant other have an agreement allowing you each to make a list five names long.

Each name must be a celebrity. If either of you meets someone on of your list, you’re allowed to have sex with them.

Suppose your mate actually meets a celebrity on his list. Are you really ok with him sleeping with her?

What if you met someone on your list? What then?

No Pink Bullets Here 

Pretend you’ve been given the authority to rewrite the rules of warfare. In other words, the power is yours to decide how armies engage, how prisoners are treated, and which weapons are lawful and unlawful to use.

Now describe how you think the next World War would go down with your rules in place.

The Object of Everyone’s Desire

If you could be the last woman alive in a world fully populated by men, would you?

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101 Questions for Women

Front Cover 101 Questions for Women

Available now!

J Edward Neill

101 Questions for Men Cover101 Questions for Humanity

My Top Seven Words of 2013

HaBones

 

 

 

 

Ignore the skull. It doesn’t have much to do with today’s blog. I’ve no real excuse for using it except that I liked it.

So anyway…

 As I’ve lain awake each night for the last four months, chiseling away at the final edits of Dark Moon Daughter, I’ve found my mind roaming into realms both strange and eerie. I’m sleep deprived. I’m locked in my man-cave. I’m in an abyss, starved for meaningful human contact, yet utterly in love with the loneliness of writing in the dark. I’ve always believed there’s a certain amount of lunacy/mild sociopathy required to be a writer, and I’m no exception. Whenever I’m locked in obsessive write-mode, I travel to places downright terrifying and weird. I dream of things that could never exist. I create sentences, destroy them, and resurrect them again and again in the wild hopes of giving my readers just a glimpse of the galactic-scale warfare taking place between my synapses.

And in doing so, I have to use words

So let’s cut to the chase. I’ve got seven of my favorite words on the tip of my tongue. I want to share them with you. I hope, after you’ve consumed my list, you’ll stuff the comments section with your favorites. I’d love to see them.

Without further ado, I present:

1. Crenellation – a rampart built around the top of a castle with regular gaps for firing arrows or guns

CrenelsCrenels

It’s no secret. I love writing about spiraling towers, vast fortresses, and cloud-penetrating, sky-wounding, bad-guy battlestations. I’m also a nut for medieval architecture. The image of a castle’s last surviving archer squatting behind a crenel and firing off arrows at the hordes below sits right with me. If you were guarding a castle, you’d want a crenellation, too. 

2. Annihilate –  destroy utterly; obliterate

What do antagonists (and just as often protagonists) desire for their enemies? Do they want to maul them, hurt them, punish them? No. What they really want is to annihilate them. They desire dust and ash, powder and bonemeal. Admit it; you’ve felt this way about someone or something. Or am I the only one?

3. Moldering – slowly decay or disintegrate, esp. because of neglect

Molder

Rot is tired. Ruin is on sick leave. Decay just took a vacation. When it absolutely, positively must be reduced to the latter stages of disintegration, it must molder. It works for houses, castles, bodies, cities, or in the case of one of my books, entire worlds.

4. Exile – expulsion from one’s native land by authoritative decree.

Exile, in a way, is worse than death. We’re not talking about the prince sent to a neighboring kingdom or a lord sent away to a posh, thousand-pillowed prison. We’re talking about total expulsion, the removal of everything a character holds sacred. We’re talking permanent banishment into a realm at the edge of civilization. “Here’s a desert, my friend, scorched by the sun during the day, stalked by three-thousand year-old wights after twilight. Enjoy…”

5. Profane – characterized by irreverence or contempt for God or sacred principles or things; irreligious.

In a close tie with blapheme and desecrate, I’ve an image in mind for profane, but I can’t put it here. No way. Not happening. Simply put, when something is profaned in a book (or real life) someone’s going to be angry…very angry. Thus vengeance is conceived.

6. Phial -a small bottle for liquids; vial

Phial

Slender. Delicate. Glass. But in these small relics might slosh the venom to lay a king in his grave, the potion to restore a lost companion to life, or the foul brew which living men dare not ingest, fearing their skins might slough off and their minds turn to porridge. ($2 to whoever guesses which concoction I’m most likely to use)    

7. Bones – The dense, semirigid, porous, calcified connective tissue forming the major portion of the skeleton of most vertebrates

This one was obvious. Maybe the skull up top belonged after all. In writing Down the Dark Path, Dark Moon Daughter, Nether Kingdom, Hollow Empire, and even Old Man of Tessera, bones played a role. We’re not limiting ourselves to human bones. We’re talking the bones of a long-sunken ship, the bones of an empire, the bones of an ancient civilization mortared to the walls of a cavern ten miles deep. Almost everything alive has a skeleton of sorts. More importantly, so does almost everything dead. My next twenty books had better be about fluffy unicorns and romantic nights on the beach, else people might start to worry.

Now it’s your turn. I want your favorite words, and why.

Love,

J Edward Neill