One of the great things about the original Star Wars movies was the strong sense of a grand, adventurous, and terrible history before the movie started. So much is hinted at through Obi Wan Kenobi about the Jedi Knights, Anakin Skywalker, great friendships, laser swords, and terrible war and loss ...

Trauma is such a delicious thing in writing- it gives characters their backstories, their motivation, their special slant in a narrative wrok, from novels to webcomics.

However, it's usually considered in the context of how it has made a character ‘damaged goods’. Why they are grim, why they're ...

When Superman returned to the big screen ten years ago or so in “Superman Returns”, the movie was intended to be a direct sequel to the two original movies with Christopher Reeve. I was surprised at how mopey and depressing the movie felt.

Which is to say, the movie felt ...

The other day while I was crocheting, I noticed that a lot of the yarn colors I had picked out over the years had a lot of grays, warm neutrals, and toned-down, muted shades of color. They were all lovely colors, but my eyes needed something more vibrant and stimulating ...

Today I got a list of stuff I want to talk to you about and remind you!

First off- USED BOOKS NEEDS OUR HELP

She has a pretty high vet bill to pay for saving the lives of her awesome rats. So please help her out whichever way you can ...

One of the toughest tropes in any kind of narrative work, from novels to comics to movies is the Sacrificial Lion - but not for what might be an obvious reason: having to axe a top tier character. It's because the trope is something that will affect and carry through ...

You’ve gone through the arduous process of fleshing out your world, the themes and the lore and you’re standing back looking at your shining new playground; but there is a blight standing right in the centre that you can no longer ignore. You hate your characters. Maybe it ...

Last week, we looked at killing off characters. So it seems only fitting to follow it up by talking about introducing new characters into your story! This is your quick cheat sheet to helping ease your readers into getting to know the new players in your world.

Try to introduce ...

The votes have been tallied up and the trophy award with the most vote is Emevsa's design!

Not far in second place is the award by KimLuster!

Also, to piggyback on last week's call for volunteers, usedbooks wrote a very nice statement on volunteering for the awards:

usedbooks ...

I have fallen off the comic horse quite a few times now and, no doubt, I will be bucked off a few more times yet. I have tried six comics and so far only two are looking like they’ll ever get finished. I have one finished novel, (which no ...