One of the best types of villains are those that you love to hate. Despite how much you would love for them to shuffle off the mortal coil, they continue to captivate you with their malice and determination and you know that when they do leave the plot, whether deserved ...

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There are many kinds love. Love is a great thing to include in your story for all sorts of reasons: it's an easy way to develop ...

Sometimes you aim for a target and you miss– but you end up with a hit anyway in an unexpected place.

When starting a new project usually the target audience is clear, people like ourselves. After all, an author usually likes their own work and has a target reader similar ...

Writing good romance is hard- it has so many pitfalls to avoid, so many tropes to grapple with and principles to keep in mind, that experience is necessary.

Writing actual platonic friendships between a male and female character is even harder.

The basic reason why it is harder is because ...

I read webcomics backwards, and maybe you should too. You might be aghast about spoilers, but trust me– almost every reader who happens upon your comic does this too.

I should specify–I don't read the entire archive backwards. It depends on the comic but typically I read back ...

Last weekend we discussed that strange phenomenon of independent creation, where there's more than a passing resemblance to another work but it's not a case of plagiarism. Interestingly, not long after I posted that I saw not one but two instances of independent creation being brought up (though ...

It's a vampire, break out your torches and pitch forks! The geek have inherited the earth, but far from it being an accepting utopia, the acceptable targets have just changed and the haters run free. There are a lot of things that people like to crap on, but few ...

There are no bad ideas, just poor execution…..terrible, awful execution.

You may have seen those games that go around on social media, such as “Describe a classic movie/video game/novel in the worst way possible”, it shows how easy it is to make any concept seem like the ...

In Swan Lake, the black swan Odile is transformed by her warlock father into the white swan, Odette, and posing as Odette she tricks the prince into breaking his oath to the white swan- because clearly making life-binding oaths to a woman you know so little you can mistake her ...

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This Quackcast was based on an idea from Banes. We chat about designing a group of characters with complementary temperaments. In Banes' own words:
“I like the idea of the line between a logical, left brained person and a creative, right brained person, crossed with a spectrum of a ...