I'm a bit obsessed with “before” versions of characters. Where they start. The damaged dude or dudette who shows up at the beginning of a story REALLY needing a change in their lives, and usually not knowing it.

Even when the plot kicks off, these folks often don't ...

The Drunk Duck Awards are still underway, there are plenty of people working on presentations for the awards and even more are signing up each day. Recent life developments have come up for our awesome presenter, Niccea, and she is unable to dedicate the same amount of time to the ...

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No new Quackcast this week so we're going retro.

Sorry guys… 334 didn't record correctly. I only discovered that while editing. Two Quackcasts we'd recorded didn't work, TWO in a row: the spare AND the current one! I don't check them right after I ...

This week I was going to talk about a comic i had found by browsing the Featured lists and seeing what else did not take off after being featured, when it really should have. A little like Grunk from last time out. Then another subject came to me and i ...

Thursdays with Banes - The Murky Middle

A good way to put together a story is to figure out some essentials, first - Elements of Character, Plot and Theme, and Building some World and all that. We've talked about these things around here a lot, and we'll prolly continue to ...

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The thing with retcons is that the author tends to get an idea which makes them want to go back over their story and redo or tweak the whole thing again, that's what's happened here… well sort off. Banes had some more ideas on the subject that ...

MILESTONE
Bravo's increasingly unepic fantasy Sword of Kings reaches 50 pages of story Monday, July 24. That's 52 total pages total though as there are two pages of behind the scenes about casting and map making.

And coincidently the page views have also dwindled to around 50 per ...

When you're just starting out, coming up with good designs is pretty simple, but when you've been doing it for a while or it's your job, you run out of easy ideas- you've picked all the low hanging fruit. What do you do then?
This applies ...

Reflection Characters

When I was doing a little reading on the “Mentor” character type, I learned about something called “Reflection Characters”. It was an eye opener; I'd never heard of this before, though I could instantly see how it made sense in storytelling, and dozens of examples came to ...

Niccea would like to get this news cycled around:

From the desk of Niccea:

This year's Drunk Duck Awards needs some help. With a newborn in the house, I don't have the time for a full commitment. At the minimum, I would like someone to manage volunteer recruitment ...