Change is difficult. Decisions are made out of comfort and convenience because staying the same is safer. Anything that strays off the beaten path has a tendency to seem foreign. It feels like a strange sensation that makes the squishy parts of the brain uncomfortable.

In a way, I am ...

You know that idea about a frog in a pot of water getting cooked before realising that the water had been gradually increasing in temperature until it was rapidly boiling? Well last week, I was the frog and my room was that pot of water.

September has been the hottest ...

Summary:
What would you do if you were plucked from your life by mysterious aliens, stored by them in zero G till you were needed, and then had your face peeled back, bones inserted, your hand skin pulled off, your finger bones stitched together, your skin turned blue, then you ...

After a long comic-making hiatus, I’ve had several ideas for comics in the last little while. Working on the first one, though, I’ve realized that unless I get a heck of a lot faster at drawing it's unlikely that all of my ideas will ever come to ...

LISTEN!

What's best? One big climax, multiple small ones, early, or delayed? How much should you work UP to a climax? What about anticlmactic events, how important are they?
Climaxes are really important in stories. Often you work up to them over the course of a whole series, but ...

Make sure you've read all the previous issues!

I'm at a nice place in my webcomic right now. Well, it's nice as the writer, at least.
The characters have a nice history now, with some adventures behind them, some established relationships, and a stable of supporting characters ...

Summer here is hot and dry, but it's so short that sometimes it feels more like a coffee break in an endless winter than a real season. People who live in the prairies know that each summer day has to be savoured - tucked away as a little memory for ...

Here are some thoughts on writing that smallest unit of a story: the scene.


First off, what is a scene? What defines it?

It's Change.

Something changes between the beginning and end of a scene.

Here's a way to write one if you're stuck. These are the ...

LISTEN!

You always do a bit of world building in fiction, in some types of stories like alternative histories, fantasy and Sci-Fi you have to do a bit more, in things set in the real world you don't have to do nearly as much - maybe only limited to a ...

Is there a word for these?

I’m talking about those things that you automatically start drawing when you have a piece of paper and no specific ideas in mind. The images that find their way into the margins of your notebooks, onto napkins in restaurants…or on a whiteboard ...