Pop culture is being visited by its own past. There's no denying the excitement surrounding the reappearance of the original Star Wars and X-Files characters after an absence of years.

We all know our mainstream entertainment is stuffed with more and more sequels, remakes, reboots, soft reboots, reimaginings, reintegrated ...

I read that a great ending should be “surprising but inevitable”. That's a tall order! To have the whole story leading to that inevitable conclusion, but not be predictable. Wow!

However, I've seen (and read…ah, let's be honest; mostly it's “seen”) several great endings that ...

If you want to decent job of it, creating and using weapons in fiction can be quite tricky. There are a lot of pitfalls that newbies and even long time veterans of creating fiction fall into.

1. Number one is simply copying what others have done without understanding it yourself ...

Two-thousand fifteen started off with Kroatz wishing everyone in the Drunk Duck forums “growth, satisfaction, and purpose, even if it comes with an almost equal amount of suffering and loss.” I do not believe any statement made in this last year comes as close to this to sum up the ...

Cast of an obscure 1970's science fiction flick. Current whereabouts unknown

One of the challenges…and maybe one of the greatest pleasures…of creating a series is populating it with a cast of heroes. I know I spend many weeks or months tinkering with characters and deciding who they ...

Yesterday evening my friend and I donned our prettiest dresses and went to see The Marriage of Figaro. Neither of us had ever been to the opera before, and we weren't the only ones - it was “student night” where they sell cheap tickets to the final dress rehearsal, so ...

If you've heard me talk for any reasonable amount of time (apologies!), you know I can't maintain much of a conversation before beginning to list movies. What can I say? I love ‘em!

So for this penultimate October Thursday, I thought I’d share my Halloween movie playlist ...

Apparently the difference between “terror” and “horror” was first expressed by writer Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), who said that Terror is the dread and apprehension about something happening, while Horror is the actual encountering the frightening thing.
Maybe this is what they mean when they talk about “suspense” vs. “horror”. Have ...

Horror…and the baddies and creepies and long-legged beasties of horror…come in many flavours.
These divisions might be incomplete or somewhat meaningless in a way, but hey, I have to approach it somehow…

Reality Bites: Human Creeps, Scary Animals and Nature
-Serial Killers, Jason, Michael Myers, The Strangers, And ...

Banes is deathly ill with the canceraids today so I'm having a go at newsposting instead.
So I want to chat about developing a sketch idea… Sometimes it can be a long and twisty road, but it's worth it to see what you end up with. Sticking with ...