Well, look! It’s Sunday again! And for this here Sunday, Sunday, Sunday article I thought I’d start this new little series of articles that the awesome Quackcast 575 inspired me to do. I shall call it the Fantastic Bestiary series, which will be a series of articles where ...

I talked last Sunday about science engaging with the supernatural in fiction and the worldbuilding stuff that can be generated from that. In this article I’m going to talk about the opposite end of that spectrum. The supernatural engaging with science. This is where I bring up Alchemy. Now ...

So it's fun to rant about tropes I hate but I actually prefer to gush about tropes I love.

And one of them is what I call “the bargain”: it's really a game of wits between a (usually lawful) villain and a hero (or protagonist/antagonist, take your ...

People experience the pace of a story in different ways according to different story mediums.

When I bought some collections of the old newspaper strip “Li'l Abner”, I was interested to see how many strips would have a panel of recap from the story so far. It was funny ...

The first time I learned about the gentle sea cows of Florida’ everglades was through a Sierra computer game called EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus. Sierra was actively doing its part to help better the world through creating a series of games that brought to light the dangerous effects of ...

So I'm exhausted today, at the end of a very eventful week and a lot of work piled on work.

Which means I can't discipline my brain to write something more artsy or tropey. Though censorship is a trope, right?

When do we have censorship appear in stories ...

Photo: “One of these days, you’re gonna die laughing.” Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988)

The 1988 mixed animation-live action film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, set in 1940s Toon Town, had a whimsical villain called Judge Doom with a team of henchmen in tow known as the Toon Patrol. The ...

I've talked at times about how, as I make Without Moonlight, I have to constantly make choices on what to include and what not to from …reality.

By that I mean that true, documented (and even photographed) events from the nazi occupation of Athens during WWII are so grotesquely ...

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Last week we did a thing of the persistent myths of fiction- fictional conventions that we all just accept, and are repeated over and over and even ...

The Disaster Episode is a template that I noticed in the different Star Trek series from the 90's.

It's a neat way to separate a big cast of characters into different small groups. And when it's done well, it can be very powerful and show a different ...