Photo: “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” Paul Gauguin. Oil on Canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. (1897-98)

A somber recollection carries me back twenty-two years ago on this day when I walked into a class where an inconsolable history teacher delivered a line ...

Last time I'd written about gender toxicity and what a trap it can be for creators seeking to write powerful characters. It is not something that only plagues the “strong female character” attempt, but also the “strong male character” and definitely the “strong LGBTQ+ character”.

Too many of these ...

Hah. Easier said than done, right?

Ask any artist about how much they like the stuff they make, and chances are you'll get a mixed bag of answers where most will be saying how they wish they'd done the stuff better. The anatomy isn't quite right, the ...

So hitting a girl (or a woman) is extremely tropey. Regardless of how progressive your story is, a man hitting a woman runs a high risk of being considered lowly or less than heroic. That's because generally, women are considered weaker than men, thus an easy target. A woman ...

As a compulsive - and rather obsessive – writer I often find myself tinkering around with language. And I’ve always found the creativity and imagination that can go into the language within a fictional world to be similar to that of an illustrator. When done well it can bring color and ...

I like the feature in my art program that allows me to see all the pages in progress at once.

Professional TV and film writers use a bulletin board with index cards to map out their stories - I've tried this a few times and it makes sense to me ...

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Cults are weird. Unlike normal religions (from which many cults stem), cults are usually based more around charismatic individuals rather than simple doctrine. Which means the followers ...

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Let's talk about total immersion… When consuming media rather than creating it, if you're lucky you become immersed: the struggles and fears of the character ...

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Happy New Year! It seems we've all decided to keep going on with the 20's so let's continue…

Did you know the year 2022 ...

It's 2022! Can you believe it?

WE SURVIVED!

Here's to more surviving for 2022, and hopefully, down the line, we can start living!

There's a tradition of making lists of new year's resolutions every season when the year changes. And I'm not going to tell ...