Villains are tremendously important for a story. They set the framework and standard for a lot of things in an unsaid but definite manner: how far your villain is willing to go sets up audience expectations for how big and how dire the stakes will be in the story.

If ...

In rewatching some 1990's movies, I saw quite a few of these Protagonists show up - they're these disaffected types, usually quite intelligent or at least verbose, who are wrapped up in their emotions and sort of spinning their wheels in life as they analyze their problems and face ...

Photo: “Windmills through the Passenger Side Window”. Photo taken by me. (June 2022).

“When June came
The grasses headed out
And turned brown,
And the hills turned brown
Which was not a brown
But a gold and saffron
And red—
An indescribable color.
And from then on until the next ...

Featured Comic (JUN-08-2022), Space Pack by Slingy, reached the end of its final chapter last Wednesday, April 12, 2023. The comic’s total run added up to 697 pages. It even includes an entire epilogue and plays out like a movie until the very end.

Space Pack Comic Summary written ...

Since I first read it, the book “Save The Cat!” has been incredibly useful to me as far as thinking about stories, outlining them, and finishing them. It's a fun way to approach structure, and applies to a LOT of mainstream stories.

It's become an essential textbook in ...

Recently I have been revisiting a sitcom that I used to love but, funnily enough, never finished. The last season of the show dropped during a hectic period of my life and by the time I had, well time, to watch it, I had lost the plot. But thanks to ...

Photo: “The Stinky Cheese Man and the Fox”. The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. By Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith. (1992)

Any the book that was ever available at silent reading was always a book that the teacher read aloud to the class. The Stinky Cheese Man ...

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 ...

Tag Forester is a hard boiled noir style PI working in and around the city of Portland, Oregon. This time his case involves the fallout from the death of an old client… Who will get the money and the house? -his cheating wife who abandoned him when he was dying ...

I was supposed to write the last post on my ‘toxic’ character design series, but I've been deep cleaning the house all day and I'm exhausted. My brain refuses to think so that post will need to wait till next time. Instead, I'd like to talk about ...