Villains are tremendously important for a story. They set the framework and standard for a lot of things in an unsaid but definite manner: how far your villain is willing to go sets up audience expectations for how big and how dire the stakes will be in the story.

If ...

Photo: “Animator Desk Belonging to Frank Thomas”. Taken at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (by me). Los Angeles, California. (October 2021).

The mid-twentieth century animator studio has always held an aura of mystery to any mind that has ever wondered how hand-illustrated animation is created. Anyone who has drawn ...

Conflict!

It's the essential building block of drama. You don't have a story without the basics of “someone wants something, and something's in the way of getting it.”

Screenwriting books - books I really love and have given me a lot - will often say that amping up the ...

There is an abandoned palace, Le Theatre Charogne, in the heart of Lapinville, a town no stranger to rabbits. The midnight bell strikes when a weary traveler searching for a place to crash decides that squatting in an abandoned theatre is preferable to sleeping on the streets. Now, preferable is ...

I was reading a critique of a series, a successful series, of novels. I think it's an urban fantasy/horror thing where the main character has a specific paranormal ability, limited, but useful in her detective work. She had a love interest, who was maybe on and off, but ...

Tough love is so cool, eh? It's going to magic the “whining” right out of you, won't it? You just need to stick out through the harshness, and then when you reap the benefits, you'll realize your tough loving benefactor had the right idea. You'll be ...

Once you see it, don’t turn back. The seals of yours approval is bleeding through your isolation.
Once you hear it, don’t turn off. The bells of yours improval is screaming through your insulation.
Once you feel it, don’t turn numb. The strokes of yours instinctual is ...

So! 2023. Did my annual tarot spread this morning and the cards that came up seems to promise quite an eventful year. But I’m not gonna go into detail about that since it is a personal prediction of mine. Instead I’m gonna talk about how something that may ...

It's customary during the final days of a year to do resolutions for the next one or overviews of what happened in the one that's ending.

Even if we buck the system, we kinda do think back and ahead, especially during New Year's Eve, don't we ...

Photo: (clockwise from upper left) nightmarelunatic’s gift for Andreas_Helixfinger; sleeping_gorilla’s for Tantz_Aerine; lothar’s gift for usedbooks; kawaiidaigakusei’s gift for davidxolukoga; and Tantz_Aerine’s gift for hushicho.

There are less than three weeks until the time of gift-giving. The planning for this year’s Secret Santa Gift ...