I'm not a superfan of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but I read some of them, liked them, and I found a lot of the characters wonderful, and many story elements have stayed with me for many years.

In that series, travelers through the cosmos could run into ...

LISTEN on our new player!
Listen on Stitcher ​​- https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/drunkduck-quackcast
Or TuneinRadio - https://tunein.com/podcasts/Books–Literature/Drunkduck-Quackcast-p1150194/

What happens to characters after the big action scene or climactic moment? This could be anywhere in the story but it's usually close to the end ...

What happens when an ex-child soldier wants to start a new life? A new comic book from Peace Direct called “The Challenges of War: Finding Freedom” tells Lembaka's story in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He joined an armed group at age 10, and after years of brutal violence ...

A few years back, a comic app called Bit Strips was very popular on social media. It was a cut-and-paste type of comic creator that allowed an easy way to design a character and create stories or comics featuring the creator’s likeness. BitStrips was popular on social media or ...

MacGuffin comin' through!


MacGuffins

I'm not sure if everyone knows this already, but a MacGuffin is a term that was made popular by Alfred Hitchcock, and is now widely used in writing and storytelling circles.

It is an item or event (or possibly even a character) that exists only ...

I've already written a bunch of articles on writing mental illness, so I figured I should write about writing therapists as well!

Oh, the woes for therapist representation in narrative works! All the stereotypes are there: from the shrink that is actually a little (or a lot) loopy and ...

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 ...

The word for ‘porn’ in Greek is unsurprisingly ‘porn’. But its vernacular synonym is a word that in reality means ‘tack-on’ or ‘added scrap’. It signifies the common (or at least until recently common) assumption that scenes with explicit sexual activity were there to pad the runtime for a movie ...

In my research for a larger article about comics and typography, I stumbled upon an article that talked about how and why the font “Comic Sans” came into existence. Published via The Guardian, Vincent Connare, Comic Sans’ typographer commented,

”One program was called Microsoft Bob, which was designed to make ...

So there's this saying that it's a completely different thing to talk the talk than walk the talk- to do as you preach. To put your money where your mouth is. To actually apply what you say you ascribe to.

In short, putting into action everything you've ...