This week's meta has the potential to be VERY SPOILERY. If you don't know how to blank out spoilers, the HTML code is like this: [font color="white"]text[/font] or [font color=#FFFFFF]text[/font] except...about things that you think would be cool but that you rarely, if ever, see authors do. Reply to other people's comments with either discussion or recommendations (text whited if necessary). :D

This week's topic: more about genre-fication. Mystery fiction, for example, has countless niche subgenres. There are knitting mysteries, cooking mysteries, cat mysteries, vacation mysteries, scholarly...a lot of triple names, and surnames that are places in the British Isles. Likewise, romance authors are disproportionately named "Josephine" or "Beverly." (Guess what I was shelving yesterday? :D

(Hi there. I'm possiblymaybe taking over/alternating with Gil on the mid-week meta.) What are the minimum elements needed to make a story FSF? --Is it FSF if the magic or technology are only part of...it's totally unlike any other sci-fi.) What's the most trope-filled thing you've read/seen that you wouldn't describe as FSF? (Some other Calvino works.) For the sake of discussion, assume last-century

Very general and open-ended question for this week: What is it about Star Trek ?

This week's topic: dialects and accents. baltimoreandme has brought up the topic before , but from the perspective of the writer; now, I'd like to see us tackle it more as consumers of media...dialects or accents you've read/seen? (I'm thinking, for instance, of the itchy class/affiliation/intelligence issues of the Redwall books, or of Scotty and Chekov's extremely audible Earth accents.

This week's topic: INSANITY! How is it portrayed? What constitutes 'madness' in fantastic cultures? What is a typical or an atypical portrayal of madness and the mad? What social, political, and religious...cliches surrounding madness? How are those cliches represented in fiction? How are they subverted? What works of fiction deal most interestingly with the subject? What makes those works interesting

Funny story (or not so Funny, actually): I have a hard time making a correlation between the day it is and the day it feels like it is. We have a cultural set of assumptions regarding the days--Monday...the number of days that one was pregnant.) How do people respond to the timekeeping systems of their worlds? What are their natural rhythms, and with what timespans do those rhythms correspond

This week's topic: Body modification. How is body modification (piercings, tattoos, cosmetic surgery) used in fantasy and science fiction? Does it replicate the body-modification norms of Earth societies...only cosmetically from, or critique earth modification customs? How do these portrayals differ as we shift in medium--i.e. how are portrayals different in novels, films, comics, and standalone art

This week's topic: Apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic fiction. The idea of the end of the world (or, more human-centrically, the end of us ) is deeply ingrained into the human mind--dozens of belief systems...end means? What are the implications of apocalypses and post-apocalyptic scenarios? How do these scenarios relate to the religious/mythological models of the eschaton (or the world's regeneration)

This week's topic--cartography! What principles of cartography do you use when creating a world? Do you build a map first, and then populate it with cities and people(s)? Do you start with the locations...order to find very specific items (e.g. treasure maps), or do they make maps for general use (e.g. atlases), or do they make searchable maps that can be attuned to any desired location (e.g. GoogleMaps)