Used Books is celebrating its tenth anniversary on Feb. 23 (Thursday), so we are interrupting the story for a couple special extras this week. The first is posted Monday.

usedbooks writes:

The Beginning

Thursday, February 23rd marks the 10th anniversary of Used Books online. I started drawing UB shortly after ...

ACT 2 - The Premise

It's about a guy who…

When we try to decide with our friends about seeing a movie, or surf Netflix for something to watch, or try to sell people on a movie/book/story we want them to experience, that's what we have to ...

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Where to start; in the past, present, or future? Will you structure your story in a linear way or do something more complex? This was the topic of Hyena Hell's newspost on Friday and in this Quackcast Pitface, Banes, Tantz, and I discuss and mull over the ideas ...

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*Art by Ozoneocean

What makes an action scene boring? Action scenes should be exciting and fun, but often it's just the opposite!
In this Quackcast we discuss the topic of Tantz's newspost from the other day and tackle this hard question.
These were Tantz's conclusions:
- You ...

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Today on the Quackcast we interview Hyena Hell!
You might remember the bombastic, punkrocker HyenaHell for her comic The Hub
She used to be very active on all of DD (forums, comics, everything), before life issues took her away from DD. But she was still a prolific poster on ...

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Jerky, jerk, jerks! Let's talk about this type of character…
This topic is based on Banes' newspost from Thursday, he based it on characters like Reggie from the Archie comics. Jerks can be pretty good characters in their own right. They can be villains, heroes, antagonists or protagonists ...

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Patriotism, flags, nationalism, religion, politics, national symbols hijacked by racists! These are some of the unique aspects of our cultural identity and national differences we chat about on this quackcast. I was inspired by HippieVan's newspost on Friday (about Cultural identity and how it defines our writing), to ...

I was hanging out with my family over the holidays, explaining that I wasn't sad or sick, but had been rubbing my eye because there was some dust or a hair or something stuck behind the eyeball. It was quite uncomfortable.

As I remembered how tears can flush out ...

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Chekhov's gun is the principal (as I understand it), that if you have some item, fact or piece of information introduced into your story that you draw specific attention to, then you'd better use it some how later on in your story. The simplest example is a ...

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What defines evil in fiction?
I say the simplest one is bad guys are selfish, good guys are selfless.
That is massively over simplistic but it's a good easy template for basic hero's and villains. Basic ones
I was just doing a quick thought experiment to work ...