image by Ben Burgraff

When writing a historical fiction, it's very likely that you will need to include some actual historical personalities along with your historically-adept yet fictional cast.

Depicting a historical character is hard enough when there's a general consensus among historians and popular belief about who ...

I had a meeting the other day with a director, who asked me “how do you approach a historical era to keep true to it?” and “how do you keep from being biased?”

I fear that I eclipsed the poor guy with my soap box lectures, but that aside, I ...

“Don't worry, Bart. It seems like every week something odd happens to the Simpsons. My advice is to ride it out, make an occasional smart-aleck quip, and by next week, we'll be back to where we started from, ready for another wacky adventure. ”

-Lisa Simpson


In most series ...

An important, but often overlooked aspect of creating a webcomic is what rating it will have, ie whether your comic is adult, young adult, children or x-rated. This question, whilst not always thought about at the conceptual stage, is by no means any less important. It is a critical way ...

Building a platonic friendship has its challenges, not only because as an author or creator of your webcomic you will need to handle the audience's propensity to assume your male and female lead will be romantically involved, but because of the demands you'll need to meet to make ...

Romance

I don't know much about the Romance Genre. I've never read a romance novel. Not that I recall, anyway.

Of course, I've seen a fair number of romance-focussed movies, and have consumed HUNDREDS of stories with a love subplot. Love is still the most common subplot ...

I'm not sure how many creators do it, but I often place my original characters in different settings, writing out stories about them very much like I'd write fanfiction about some established franchise.

It's even more fun when I do it mixing them up with characters from ...

Inspiration strikes! A new idea forms, and you're really excited about it. You want to take your time, however– you want this to be great, and no great thing just springs fully formed from one's brow. For years you toil, tweak, refine, moving ever closer to the point ...

So if vampires are a hot mess and haters are at the gates what can YOU learn from vampires? Well, a lot, vampires are not the only over extended sub-genre out there. Let's explore another genre that is trying to avoid ending up in a similar space, superheroes, specifically ...

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 ...