There was recently a Provincial Election in the part of Canada where I live, and there's a Federal Election coming up in about a year.

With the brouhaha going on in the world these days about politics and the divisions between many people that are resulting from it, I ...

May the Forcefulness Be With You


I've been fascinated to watch the unfolding of the “battle” between Disney's Lucasfilm and the fandom playing out over the past few months.

If you haven't been looking at the fallout, there's too much for me to cover here; I ...

Yesterday, Mks_Monsters asked me to talk about an experience of hers, which I have seen being shared with a range of creators belonging to certain social groups (female, LGBTQ, POC, etc) if their occasional tweets on the matter are to be believed: That support for them on the basis of ...

LISTEN!

ALL the tropes!!!!
Based on Emma Clare's newspost, tropes are damn useful but they can also be your undoing if you handle them badly. Tropes are shortcuts to meanings, scenes, procedures or jokes that take too long to set up in their own right. You can use them ...

Maureen is a happy go lucky student, just wanting nothing more than to go and see her favourite band with her best friend. But it looks like that's not going to happen… this is a world filled with super powered supervillains and only a tiny handful of heroes to ...

Tropes aren’t bad. In fact, they are a useful and, at times, necessary shorthand that creators, particularly in the webcomic field, can wield to enhance their work. J Hillis Miller posited a trope as, “… the use of figurative language, via word, phrase or an image, for artistic effect.”

Every ...

So last time we had talked about the Javert trope, a category of character that is very compelling and makes for excellent drama, immense suspense and often gets their own following in fandom. (Just check out Saito Hajime's hero's journey as a prime example.)

The Javert character is ...

Inspiration is quite the rush. The mind is set alight with seemingly limitless possibilities and, in that moment, you want to experience them all. For a creator, inspiration is the high that we pursue. But eventually our creative significant other packs up their stuff and quietly disappears into the night ...

A story can be strengthened by coordinating the first and final images in some way.

It's not a hard and fast rule; it's not a rule at all. But it can be worth trying out in your writing!

The movie Halloween (there it is! I had to start ...

Kiro is sent far, far into the icy northern wastes of Alaska as punishment for her crimes, but the place she arrives isn't the prison she expects. It's not a prison at all… It's far worse. She soon finds herself at the mercy of her fellow inmates ...