Writing a character with mental illness can be a very tricky thing. Writers usually go for the extremely rare, exotic and spectacular: multiple personality disorders, extreme manifestations of psychopathy or sociopathy, high functioning autism with that ever alluring ‘savant’ magic going for the character, bombastically spectacular schizophrenia… in many ways ...

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Happy new year! This is the first Quackcast recorded in 2019! Pitface is back too, can you believe it? In this Quackcast we chat about Imitation, based ...

I'm not sure how many creators do it, but I often place my original characters in different settings, writing out stories about them very much like I'd write fanfiction about some established franchise.

It's even more fun when I do it mixing them up with characters from ...

If you are like 92.4% of people at the beginning of the New Year (not a factual number mind you), you have sat down with a shine in your eye to set about making a list of goals to achieve in 2019. I know I have. So far there ...

This year, I am spending New Year’s Eve Weekend in Las Vegas to watch Lady Gaga perform in concert. (In fact, as soon as this post goes live, I might still be walking up and down the strip.) I always thought the way the first day of the new ...

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Merry Christmas one and all! And all that stuff. This year our release date falls exactly on the 25th! It was a busy year for us, lots ...

Tumblr made its name years ago as a great place to post images. It was always a kind of photo album journal site. Unlike Facebook and other places that were more about text, Tumblr did a really good job with pictures. Other sites have since moved into that territory but ...

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We mined Tantz's Saturday newspost for our discussion topic: Strong characters and how to write GOOD ones!
What is a strong character? Well ...

A ton of things have been written about “strong female characters”- how we need them in narratives, and what it means to have them in a creative work's cast. Tons of discussions and social media wars have been waged on what it is that makes a female character strong ...

So if vampires are a hot mess and haters are at the gates what can YOU learn from vampires? Well, a lot, vampires are not the only over extended sub-genre out there. Let's explore another genre that is trying to avoid ending up in a similar space, superheroes, specifically ...