My city had a massive snowfall on Boxing Day this year – the day after Christmas, for you non-Canadians. Nothing too unusual for a Canadian winter, but even so the city always seems to grind to a halt when it happens. After having a neighbour help him get his car unstuck ...

Witness the birth of Salamander, a super-heroine granted powers by a fire salamander.

Erin is a fairly average 22 year old working in a pet store until the store is hit by an arson attack,
when her life is in danger things take a dramatic change.

Salamander is shaping up ...

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Chekhov's gun is the principal (as I understand it), that if you have some item, fact or piece of information introduced into your story that you draw specific attention to, then you'd better use it some how later on in your story. The simplest example is a ...

To me this is one of the most fascinating elements of storytelling. The idea behind Chekhov’s Gun is to employ parsimony in the information comprising a plot and content: If something isn’t essential to the story, just don’t include it. Little by little, it became more “if ...

Sorry about last week’s missed newspost, everyone! Last week’s post happened to fall on “friend Christmas.” I’m the world’s worst adult, and spent the day eating so much holiday junk food that I got sick and had to go to bed rather than finish writing. I ...

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What defines evil in fiction?
I say the simplest one is bad guys are selfish, good guys are selfless.
That is massively over simplistic but it's a good easy template for basic hero's and villains. Basic ones
I was just doing a quick thought experiment to work ...

Happy New Year’s Eve!
Thinking about the new year that is just about to begin, I thought to talk about beginnings in stories, and especially in webcomics.

How a story begins, the very first pages of it, are key for catching the audience’s attention and keeping it. The ...

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Art by Tantz Aerine

It's Christmas time again… well at least it was two days ago when we recorded he cast. Today's Quackcast is a rambling christmas discussion of various things that take our fancy like the Secret Santa gift thread (linked down bellow), and the amazing ...

part of the painting “The last days of Messolonghi” by François-Émile de Lansac

First things first- Happy Holidays everyone!

In all types of creative writing and artwork, and definitely in webcomics we always talk about the ultimate stakes in the game- death. Death is absolute and irreversible (except when it ...

Talking Stock

A good character is a three-dimensional character, right? They have to be relateable. With wants and fears that make sense. And a bit of a history. And a flaw or two to keep them “human”. And a wound to try and overcome. And maybe even a contradiction within ...