Now that's a little TOO scary!

Horror is perfect for metaphor and allegory. In fact, a horror story is often allegorical by default, what with its bizarre landscapes and freaky beasties.

Here are some categories of horror and some thoughts on what they symbolize:

Reality Bites


psycho killer! Qu ...

You have your story, your characters, your outline is looking schmick and you have a good buffer under your belt. Now what do you call all of it? Today I have some tips on how you can come up with the perfect name!

Know your genre
If you’re mentioning ...

In a world with creatures that resemble cute pocket monsters, there is a small, pink Mew-type animal that loves to give advice at a booth (as suggested by the title “Ask Andante”). Andante lives in a world with very similar creatures that also spend time responding and answering random questions ...

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 ...

Last week, I went into the basics of building your fictional worlds. We’re continuing on with our second instalment where we’ll dive a bit deeper into the nitty gritty of world building. Without further ado…

What’s your world’s system of government?
Politics plays a large role ...

A key aspect to creating a story, be it a modern day slice-of-life, an epic space opera or a high fantasy saga, is the world in which the characters inhabit. Now there are lots of aspects to consider when building your story and, this week, we’ll be going into ...

I'm not sure who the first fictional character was that I became attached to. The Cat in the Hat? Superman or Batman? Animal from the Muppets? Oscar the Grouch?

In any case, Jughead Jones was somewhere in that very early group of beloved characters. I liked Archie, and envied ...

And so we have arrived to the juicy stuff- Evil Psychologists!

You'd be surprised, but there have been a LOT of those in real life. It's the reason that the ethics code and penalization if that code is broken is so severe for professionals in the mental health ...

There are many anthro creatures in the world now, decades after Chernobyl bathed the world in mutagenic radiation humanoid animals have almost become a norm. Our story centres on Moly Lusc, a chain-smoking, sassy black streetwise seal with an attitude, a knack for survival and a bit of a ruthless ...

Having completed the (very quick) foray into the workings of motivations, ideologies and behaviors, the time has come for a look-see of all your amazing comments, from all three articles!

I haven't done this before so I'm not entirely sure how to present them. I'll wing it ...