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 ...

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 ...

Every building needs a skeleton in place before building begins, so that the end product will be sound. It’s no different with fantasy world building: before you begin gathering and using your story’s bricks and mortar (= the research) you need to have the world’s skeleton, or rigging ...

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 ...

LISTEN!

In this Quast we talk about immortality, which is a common trope in literature. Who seeks immortality in stories? It's usually bad guys, and it usually has some sort of extreme price,catch or dark side, so much so that people actually believe that if immortality WAS real ...

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 ...

image by me

There are many ways to create a fantasy world. Sometimes you need something very elaborate and thought out in the minutest detail and sometimes you need just enough to sketch out a minimal stage for your story to work.

So the first thing to do when deciding ...

Where's Chuck? - Retcons

Hello again!

On the previous Quackcast we talked about retcons - here's that episode if you care to listen:

http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2017/jul/08/quackcast-331-retconning-your-work/

A retcon is a little tricky to define perfectly, but I guess it boils down to an alteration ...

The Cherub Brothers is a panel-a-day comic about two supposed angels- Sun and Zel– told from the perspective of Corey; an everyday kid who observes the kind things the “brothers” do for others, despite their…quirks. Corey’s perspective as he talks to his friends gives the insight an urban ...