The stars couldn't have aligned better, and we're suddenly here again!

The Drunk Duck Awards 2025 are already in the works, organized by the awesome Niccea! If you missed it, have a look at the DD Awards 2025 forum thread.

And since the DD Awards are underway, the ...

LISTEN on our player!
Or Amazon Music - https://music.amazon.com.au/podcasts/24f85853-5d63-44ac-885f-da23db0a53ad/the-quackcast

Ensemble casts is the topic for today! But what do we mean by that? The way I'm defining it for THIS Quackcast is that you have a group of main characters where any of ...

It may just be my impression, but usually when a story is set in a dystopian setting, the dystopia is played straight. However, when the characters encounter or start off in a utopian setting, they almost always will end up realizing that the utopia is actually a mirage, and in ...

LISTEN on our player!
Or Amazon Music - https://music.amazon.com.au/podcasts/24f85853-5d63-44ac-885f-da23db0a53ad/the-quackcast

Happy Easter! Well that was Sunday, but happy Easter anyway. In honour of that yearly and ancient ritual holiday that has its roots in the rebirth of spring in the northern hemisphere our Quackcast is ...

It's Resurrection Saturday today! What better occasion then than this to talk about the resurrection trope?

Usually, cancelling out a character's death is not a good thing to do in a story. It undermines the weight of the stakes involved and/or the sacrifice or seriousness of the ...

As creators of stories, be they novels or graphic novels or comics, we all have heard the adage “write what you know”. It's been drummed into our minds to the point that its cold fingers have our impostor syndrome in a deathgrip every time we venture our to write ...

LISTEN on our player!
Or Amazon Music - https://music.amazon.com.au/podcasts/24f85853-5d63-44ac-885f-da23db0a53ad/the-quackcast

Watching, reading, and listening to things a second, third or even a million times can offer you a whole new experience. Why do we pick up the same thing to enjoy again? It could be ...

No matter what the characters in your story might be doing–fighting crime, resisting alien invasion, surviving in a harsh radioactive wasteland, or just working in an office–sometimes it's fun to remove them from their ‘regular’ activities and place them somewhere different and out of their social comfort ...

LISTEN on our player!
Or Amazon Music - https://music.amazon.com.au/podcasts/24f85853-5d63-44ac-885f-da23db0a53ad/the-quackcast

I love those characters who bitch and moan and want to do things differently, although they don't usually take up the leadership role themselves, they just THINK they should be leader instead, but they ...

Photo: “A Page of the Tuesday Funnies Used to Wrap a Mason Jar at the Thrift Store”. The San Diego Union-Tribune. (February 2025)

Gleaning for vintage supplies at the local thrift store, I made out with an assortment of cream coloured typewriter papers weathered by age from card stock cotton ...