Ok yes. Plot armor in general is considered a mistake. With good reason. Enough plot armor and there are no stakes left in your plot, and the audience isn't worried your plot-armored characters may not make it. And if there's no suspense, there's no engagement or the ...

Photo: Drunk Duck Awards 2022 Group Photo. Community Project. (2022)

Hey y’all, Ducks! Let us give the awards some love today.

Niccea writes:

Time to figure out where in the closet you put your formal wear.  The Drunk Duck Awards ceremony kicks off on Monday with the Red Carpet ...

Photo: 2022 NFMS Bulletin Editor Awards Winner of Best Drawn Feature, “Untitled Rockhounding 63”. The KAMics. 25 June 2021. Story and illustrations by KAM.

A round of applause goes out to Keith Alan Morgan, also known as KAM, whose submissions of The KAMics to the publication, The Tumbler, have not ...

In this newspost I thought I’d start breaking away from myth a little bit. So far I’ve brought up species and entities from myth and legend, but this is not a series of articles that is just about mythical fiction, but also popular fiction. So! Wookies! Absolutely iconic ...

So it's fun to rant about tropes I hate but I actually prefer to gush about tropes I love.

And one of them is what I call “the bargain”: it's really a game of wits between a (usually lawful) villain and a hero (or protagonist/antagonist, take your ...

It's Christmas Day today!

What are the chances! It's the first time my day to post in the blog is so perfectly timed for well wishes! So first off, I'd like to wish you all a happy Christmas Day, and if you don't observe it, a ...

Yesterday I logged onto Twitter and saw this tweet trending.





And ohohoho I knew there was spicy drama afoot.

This origin story of this tweet was an column by Rob Salkowitz titled Who's a creative professional in the comics world? The answer is getting more complicated. He makes a ...

We live in a world of routine, predictability, and pedestrian problems. (2020 doesn't count. Much.)

Magic doesn't really seem to exist in our world.

Or does it?

Perhaps we live above a very thin surface, like floating on a tranquil lake, and just underneath it there are ghouls ...

Though I am certainly no stranger to handling the horrific in my creations, horror as a genre is something I never dabbled in before.

Horror scares me the same way comedy does!

While I can crack jokes, I always feel I can never do it on demand, or consistently think ...

I've talked about villains before and how they can be very nuanced in their motivations (without those motivations being redeeming) but today, thanks to Emma Clare's Friday post, I became inspired to talk about abject, absolute, abominable villainy! The twirling mustache type, the one that is so pure ...