Lately I've been spending some time doing some light renovations on my house. I'm under some pressure with this stuff, and it's been very difficult, mentally.

For the most part, things are working out so far. These are renos that some people could pull off with barely ...

When independent movies became big in the 1990's, there was the sudden realization that a lot of flaws could be forgiven in visuals, acting, and production value when the story being told was original or compelling. They could still be effective and popular…sometimes with massive numbers of people ...

Daredevil was a comic I didn't read regularly, although I went through an issue of DD from time to time and had enough interest in the whole Marvel Universe to know his basic history quite well.

Of course, this once-obscure area of interest is now general knowledge, so we ...

Have you ever taken a walk with a young person?

Each morning when I get to work early, I walk down to the bus circle and wait for one little boy's bus to arrive at school. On the good mornings, he walks off the bus grinning from ear-to-ear with ...

I think most of us who live in or near big cities have been to comic conventions. But despite having such a huge concentration of artists here, we seldom seem to talk about broader arts communities. I’ve always been a casual patron of local art galleries, but the curatorial ...

A well written protagonist will generally have some flaws, starting out as an underdog of some kind, with lessons to learn and improvements to make over the course of the story.

Granted, some heroes are, well, just heroes, who are pretty much who they need to be from the beginning ...

Today we'll talk sequel and series character arcs, and focus on the cinematic portrayal of Iron Man

Last Week we talked about character arcs. They're an important element of fiction writing…although a lot of the time, there is no arc! But a strong, unpredictable character arc can ...

I've recently been watching Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries on Netflix. Phryne Fisher is undoubtedly a wish-fulfillment character – almost unapologetically so. She is sexy, bold, and intelligent. Whenever a new challenge is put before her, she reveals a previously-unmentioned skill that saves the day (see the above image where ...

A character starts in one state of being, and ends in a very different state of being.

The Character Arc in a nutshell!

Every time the subject of character arcs comes up around the site or on the Quackcast, one of the first examples that comes to my mind is ...

“I am just a labyrinth of ideas stuck in the middle of nowhere. Death is the only thing that's real. Life is the only thing that deserves saving.”

This first chapter's main title shares its name with Carl Jung's psychoanalytic idea of the the animus, an anthropomorphic ...