It may just be my impression, but usually when a story is set in a dystopian setting, the dystopia is played straight. However, when the characters encounter or start off in a utopian setting, they almost always will end up realizing that the utopia is actually a mirage, and in ...

In designing a good villain character there's a wide range of paths one can follow. From the grandiose villains that want to take over the world and live in volcano islands, waiting for the hero to fall into their elaborate death trap to humanized villains with complex backstories that ...

Cynicism. That is the inclination to believe that people are motivated in large by their self-interest and therefore cannot be trusted – at least not initially. I’ve found myself – as I’ve gotten older and encountered many different acquaintances and personal relations in my younger years – that I’ve become ...

Riley Zinc and Flint Dartson smuggle themselves to the crazy sea plateau island of Mercia in an airship and immediately find themselves in the middle of a dastardly mystery! A senator is killed right in front of Riley by having a vending machine squish him flat. By a series of ...

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This Quackcast is a sequel to our Quackcast last week on alternative character growth, but instead of Star Wars this time we decided on Indiana Jones. It's a really interesting creative writing exercise, we think up ...

Photo: “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” Paul Gauguin. Oil on Canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. (1897-98)

A somber recollection carries me back twenty-two years ago on this day when I walked into a class where an inconsolable history teacher delivered a line ...

If you look up Wikipedia on apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction it will be described as a subgenre in which the earth’s (or another planet’s) civilization is collapsing or has collapsed. It can be due to the cause of nuclear war, or climate change, a pandemic (maybe one that ...

Hey all! Wasn’t in the mood to put up another poem for this Sunday post, so I’d thought I instead dedicate this Sunday post to something I’ve done recently. Last Tuesday June 6th it was Swedish National Day and the day before that day I spent the ...

Been dragging my feet writing this Sunday article - among many other things - as I’ve been hit by this latest compulsive obsession of mine to keep rearranging my Youtube library to perfectly push out the distracting vestiges of my past internet media consumption, in order to become more focused in ...

Recently it struck me. So far I’ve already brought up two water-based mythic beings in this series of articles, and non of them were mermaids. Which is why I’ve decided to talk about them here today. We’re pretty much all familiar with mermaids. Though maybe not as ...