My introduction to “otherworldly” entertainment came in the form of a western science fiction serial in the mid-1940s. The Phantom Empire , filmed in the 30s and starring Gene Autry, played Saturday afternoons at our local theater. Then Star Trek premiered in the fall of 1966. During the 20-year lapse between Autry and Captain Kirk and for decades thereafter, however, I never stepped over the line into the exciting world of fantasy. That changed a few years ago when I began reading S.K. Randolph’s novel, The DiMensioner’s Revenge . This first book of The Unfolding Trilogy gripped my attention by the end of the prologue and held it all the way to the last page. Volumes 2 and 3— The ConDra’s Fire and The MasTer’s Reach —continued the adventure, and tension mounted as good and evil battled across the galaxy. The ending of the third volume—stunning as it was—left me hoping that, somehow and in some form, the series would continue. Then I received an advance copy of The ComPanion . My ...

Please welcome fantasy author S.K. Randolph to the Blood-Red Pencil today. While in college, I was introduced to fantasy fiction for the first time. I read and reread Tolkien’s Trilogy and The Hobbit , immersed myself in Narnia, and devoured everything I could find by Ray Bradbury, Ursula Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, Patricia McKillip, Sharon Shinn, and the list goes on. This resulted in an ever-deepening desire to create my own world, to write fantasy. In 2003, while on a sabbatical from Interlochen Center for the Arts, I began my first novel. Immediately, I encountered a stumbling block—naming my world/worlds and the characters that inhabited them. Always a lover of word games, I started playing with anagrams as means of achieving this. The puzzles, the acts of discovery, and the outcomes fascinated me. First, I selected the word of origin based upon a characteristic of the place, object, or character to be named. For example, I needed to name a tower at the center of a forest fil...