No, the above title was not taken from a tabloid headline (though I wouldn't be too surprised if there WAS one). Rather I'm making a nod to a time-honored technique of good fantasy fiction: playing with the mind's normal associations, in the hope that readers take a step back and look more closely at aspects of life that they'd previously taken for granted.

For you aspiring fantasy writers out there, I believe there's some encouragement here. A whole world of wonder can be built up from a little distortion – or rather, a subtle bending of reality as we know it. Once we've done this, it's just a matter of following all the implications of the change we've made. A believable – though fantastic – setting will be the result, with enough plot elements and characters to fill a novel – or two. Or several.

I'll outline a few approaches to "bending reality" with the intention of creating a world that is not-quite-like the one we know.

1. Prohibition

This theme is found in a slew of fairy-tales, and is as old as Adam and Eve eating of the forbidden fruit. Robert Jordan makes good use of it in his "Wheel of Time" series: his characters must not tap into the (tainted) male half of the universal source of power. Our world, of course, has its own prohibitions. If you introduce one into your invented setting – a "thou shalt not" that is different from any of our real-world laws – then your cultures will develop in ways that are exotic and "otherworldly".

I come from a musical background, so when I began my first fantasy novel I knew that I wanted to include a prohibition against music. Right away, music became a source of unknown and uncanny power. Why else would the people in my invented world fear it so much as to outlaw it? So this one simple twisting of the life situation that WE know here in America revealed to me so much else about the story I was embarking upon.

2. Taking Out of Usual Context

Salvador Dali was a master of this device. So were the surrealist poets and the songwriters of the psychedelic era. It's just a mundane evening out at a fine restaurant until your waiter serves you a flaming violin atop a bed of romaine.

To be successful, this tactic has to be used sparingly. In other words, ground your story in reality 90% of the time. Robert Jordan's magical world has a sun that rises and sets, rivers that flow downhill and mountains that run in chains. His inclusion of Shadowspawn and Trollocs would not have been nearly so striking if his other characters had already been floating around weightless due to zero gravity. The magical incidents in his story have such resonance in part because so much else resembles the world we're familiar with. Magic is the "burning violin on a platter" in an otherwise ordinary dining room.

3. Exploring the Extraordinary in the Everyday

Here I'll refer back to this article's title. I merely twisted around some words in a news-heading entitled: "Cat born with two faces amazes vets". This was NOT a tabloid. It refers to a real event that happened recently here in Roseburg, Oregon.

Looking at the picture of this two-faced cat, it's not hard for me to imagine Gemini the Mystic Feline who forever peers into the past and future simultaneously. That's a flight of fancy; but then again, the real thoughts within that cat's head are probably just as astonishing, if not more so. Heck, I don't even know if he has one brain or two.

Our own world can be every bit as strange and exotic as fantasy sometimes.

Seth Mullins is the author of "Song of an Untamed Land", a novel of speculative fantasy in lawless frontier territory. Visit Seth at http://authorsden.com/sethtmullins.