Given that it was Valentine's Day yesterday, and that is associated with a lot of special moments between couples, I thought we could talk about the Day After! What do you do on the Day After? Do you run to buy a pill or do you roll over and ...

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 ...

Peace Direct is launching a comic book online that tells the true story about a former child soldier in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He joined a militia to avenge his father's death, later escaped and is now starting a new life as a farmer.

The comic book will ...

It's 1995, the fall of the Soviet Union has gone hard for its former states, particularly Ukraine, which has partiallly collapsed into anrachy. This is the story of a young person with a shotgun struggling to survive the harsh winter alone in the snow, hiding from fellow humans in ...

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I recently had to upgrade my main computer because Windows isn't supporting Windows 7 any longer and I don't want to install Windows 10 on ...

A few Newsposts from our contributors have mentioned plotting or planning vs the pantsing or ‘discovery’ approach to writing.

Plotting, which is obviously building some kind of plan or outline, is an approach many writers swear by, at least to some degree. It might be a vague plan, with a ...

Greetings, citizens!

Superpowers coming from magical abilities or fantastic technology are essential to many stories in the fantasy and science fiction genres. They can show up in other genres, too, like horror and of course, superhero stories (are they science fiction stories? Science-Fantasy? Heroic Fantasy? Whatever - most of those folks ...

Therapists are the type of character whose occupation can easily seep into their ‘off the clock’ life. It's not something that can often be helped. Psychologists don't ‘turn off’ their perception of behavioral patterns and personality analyses, the same way you can't ‘unsee’ the rabbits after you ...

MacGuffin comin' through!


MacGuffins

I'm not sure if everyone knows this already, but a MacGuffin is a term that was made popular by Alfred Hitchcock, and is now widely used in writing and storytelling circles.

It is an item or event (or possibly even a character) that exists only ...

I've already written a bunch of articles on writing mental illness, so I figured I should write about writing therapists as well!

Oh, the woes for therapist representation in narrative works! All the stereotypes are there: from the shrink that is actually a little (or a lot) loopy and ...