Senses of Humor

My entire family has the strange habit of picking up odd phrases from movies, TV shows, etc. and quoting them for years on end---until hardly anyone else in the universe knows what the heck they're talking about! Some of these sayings include:
     "Holy Toledo, Batman!" (inspired by Adam West's TV series )
     "Have fun storming the castle!" (from The Princess Bride )
     "Inconceivable!" ( also from The Princess Bride )
     "That's like locking the barn doors after the horses have eaten your children!" ( from Staurday the Fourteenth )
     "Wot? The curtains?" (from Monty Python's Holy Grail )
     "I'm not dead yet." (ditto )

I'm left to conclude that a weird sense of humor is indeed hereditary; it's in your genes, so there's absolutely nothing you can do about it---what it's doing in your jeans I'd hate to say! ( I was brought up on the Marx brothers, sorry, folks! )

So what does a SOH have to do with my writing? Well, I tend to think of at least some of my characters as having a similar SOH. While I try to restrain myself, some lines manage to sneak their way in there, particularly whenever Kalom of Eris is speaking. That cocky, cheeky Thrasian just says whatever he likes. Try restraining him!

Malkis of Tartarus' SOH is perhaps the oddest. Tartarians don't really possess much of a sense of humor, but he's been around Terrans and other races long enough to have been "culturally contaminated". Hughes has very little SOH---he takes life and all his responsibilities far too seriously. At times he's downright grim. ( He had a much better SOH as a young man---which you will hopefully see someday in the prequel "Malkis of Tartarus". )

Rona Scott is a lot more fun than either of those two, which is probably why she gets along so well with Kalom. She's imaginative and playful and enjoys teasing people, particularly her husband. But it's no wonder she doesn't enjoy being trapped on gloomy Tartarus, among such humorless, rigid, and judgmental people.

Here's hoping that True Son of Tartarus will be available in just a few more weeks. The wait is killing me! But I promise you, it'll be worth the wait.

MRTighe