Conflict!

It's the essential building block of drama. You don't have a story without the basics of “someone wants something, and something's in the way of getting it.”

Screenwriting books - books I really love and have given me a lot - will often say that amping up the ...

I'm a big fan of story structure. It can be a big help to figuring out how to put a story together in a way that works. Not that structure needs to be followed in a slavish way, or that one structure applies to every story.
But it can ...

The term “Mary Sue” became a lot more mainstream a few years ago - but around comic book websites like ours, and circles that were into writing and deeper fandom have been well versed with this for much longer.

The Mary Sue is a character who has abilities or positive qualities ...

I was reading a critique of a series, a successful series, of novels. I think it's an urban fantasy/horror thing where the main character has a specific paranormal ability, limited, but useful in her detective work. She had a love interest, who was maybe on and off, but ...

When I first started putting together my story idea for Typical Strange many years ago, I imagined it to be an animated series. With a lot of time and effort and learning Toon Boom software along the way, I had a pretty strong idea of the main characters, and a ...

Die Hard was a surprise smash hit back in the day, and became famous in some circles as a template for screenwriters to pitch their stories (“It's Die Hard on a bus”…or a boat, or a jet, or in a house).

It's also talked about as a ...

Shmuck Bait is the name, I think coined by one of the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul writers, where a cliffhanger or shocking ending leads the audience to believe something major has changed. For example, the appearance that a major character has died. But when the next episode/issue/book ...

Hello everyone, Genejoke here to talk about the second drunkduck anthology.
Things have been ticking away slowly in the background and we have four complete stories and a number in the works, however things have gone a little quiet since the holidays so it's time to get things moving ...

I've been a notorious procrastinator. Well, notorious in my own mind at least.

Last summer my folks were goodly enough to give me a large pile of dirt.

Hey, did you say that's more than I deserved? You cheeky devil!

It was to fill some holes and ruts ...

And a One and a Two and a–


The third and possibly final volume of the Guardians of the Galaxy films is coming out later this year. Or next year. Or whatever.

I liked the first two a lot, and in an interview snippet, James Gunn mentioned how the third ...