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 ...

LISTEN!

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 ...

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 ...

One dock, three people. Una garza negra, the black dock.

It is sunset at a small pier as two men sit silently side-by-side when one of them breaks the silence. The two have an exchange of small talk when the quietest man begins a philosophical discussion about society and how ...

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 ...

Continuing to expand my knowledge and discover comics on The Duck that I had previously let slip by me, last week I found something amazing. A comic that seems low down in the ranking of it's genre. A comic that has only 10 Likes (including me) at time of ...

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 ...

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Starwars, Ender's game, Captain America… All these are great examples (or bad ones) of “retcons”. But what IS a “retcon”?
What it means is that you go back and change an established work by adding new information that has the effect of changing it in a small or ...