I'm a bit obsessed with “before” versions of characters. Where they start. The damaged dude or dudette who shows up at the beginning of a story REALLY needing a change in their lives, and usually not knowing it.

Even when the plot kicks off, these folks often don't ...

A young orphan. A mysterious man in a cloak. A gorilla that can sing Italian Opera. A cute little green dinosaur. Welcome to the planet Barter, a planet that is supposedly a Black Market planet. Chapter One starts off with a young girl talking to a ghost in a junkyard ...

Having decided that shock value is needed in your comic and you must scare, disgust or generally traumatize your audience in some way in order to get the emotional reaction to serve your theme and your subject matter, how do you decide when and where to draw the line? (note ...

Cyrenna is still a schoolgirl but she's already a footsoldier in the mafia. It's the family business, and she's part of “The Family”. Things are about to get very real for her… No spoilers! Two hard bitten professional mercenaries are sent in to clean up the mess ...

MILESTONE
Bravo's increasingly unepic fantasy Sword of Kings reaches 50 pages of story Monday, July 24. That's 52 total pages total though as there are two pages of behind the scenes about casting and map making.

And coincidently the page views have also dwindled to around 50 per ...

Every building needs a skeleton in place before building begins, so that the end product will be sound. It’s no different with fantasy world building: before you begin gathering and using your story’s bricks and mortar (= the research) you need to have the world’s skeleton, or rigging ...

Reflection Characters

When I was doing a little reading on the “Mentor” character type, I learned about something called “Reflection Characters”. It was an eye opener; I'd never heard of this before, though I could instantly see how it made sense in storytelling, and dozens of examples came to ...

Niccea would like to get this news cycled around:

From the desk of Niccea:

This year's Drunk Duck Awards needs some help. With a newborn in the house, I don't have the time for a full commitment. At the minimum, I would like someone to manage volunteer recruitment ...

art by yours truly

It is no secret that as an artist, it is prose that I’m professional at rather than painting/drawing. And historical fiction aside, what I’m told I write quite well is fantasy. So, for a long time I have wanted to talk about writing ...

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Art from Wikipedia

Welcome to the the yungle
Characters make or break a story. In this quackcast Tantz Aerine brings all her skills as a head-shrink to bear and gives us the low-down on Jungian character archetypes! Jung was a clever Swiss bloke, a contemporary of that strange fellow ...