Last time we talked about motivation in people, and its relationship to behavior. And I must say you all had great comments I feel deserve to be addressed, so instead of a four-part tour to the world of what makes people tick, I will add a fifth part where I ...

So on occasion, there's a lot of controversy over gender bending characters- that is, to change the character's sex from male to female or vice versa.

I'm not going to talk about my take on this controversy. At least not in this article.

What I want to ...

Nothing is going right for poor Doctor Jekyll… Whatever can go wrong for the good doctor DOES. He gets drenched in mud, loses a high status job, and then loses his fiancée to another man. But he's a nice guy, he holds none of that against anyone, all he ...

Monkey Nukes is a very enjoyable story comic. Once you start it you'll soon be engrossed in the lives and the struggles of the characters as they go about their days, bursting with potential and secrets in 1980s west London… I could go on but Simonmackie explains it far ...

Guilt is a powerful tool in the creative process.

No, I'm not talking about the guilt you feel because you haven't updated in six months which pushes you to sit down and finish that darn page (though that helps too, we've all been there).

Guilt is very ...

When creating a story you begin leading the reader down a path. You know where you’re going, or at least can pretend to know, but the reader does not. But, with some well laid out clues and foreshadowing, they can begin to piece the map together. Now here comes ...

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What's your favourite weapon in fiction?
Mine are ridiculously giant swords, huge anti-tank rifles, and mecha. There are a lot of complex reasons for weapon choices ...

I had a meeting the other day with a director, who asked me “how do you approach a historical era to keep true to it?” and “how do you keep from being biased?”

I fear that I eclipsed the poor guy with my soap box lectures, but that aside, I ...

This is the fascinating and harrowing tale of a person discarded by society, used up, pushed to the side and forced through the cracks. You are shown life from his unique perspective and taken into his dark world, increasingly farther on the fringes of every day life. And yet he ...

Writing a character with mental illness can be a very tricky thing. Writers usually go for the extremely rare, exotic and spectacular: multiple personality disorders, extreme manifestations of psychopathy or sociopathy, high functioning autism with that ever alluring ‘savant’ magic going for the character, bombastically spectacular schizophrenia… in many ways ...