I remember way back in the day, hearing a writer on the cartoon ‘King of the Hill’, who'd been a writer on ‘The Simpsons’ saying that on the Simpsons, is was all about how many jokes you could get in a scene…in a page…and even how many ...

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Tantz's clever idea was that the weather isn't just a backdrop… it's an important prop in it's own right.
Weather can be used ...

I Was Wrong - The Character Arc

Last time I was here I talked about “The Old Warrior”. It's one of my favorite character types and story elements.

This time I'm going to go into another trope/theme that almost always works for me: The realization of a character ...

When you're creating the look of your fictional world what can really help you in the design of the look and feel of it is coming up with a “Design Language”.
What I mean by this is the theme of the overall look of things and the reasons for ...

I have come across many awe-inspiring sights Along my Summer travels across the Eastern Coast of the United States. I have walked inside grand mansions decorated with Victorian-era Second Empire, French Rococo Revival, and Aesthetic movements on Newport, Rhode Island; I touched a replica of the Caves of Lascaux in ...

Some time ago I found this writer alignment chart on Twitter, (or maybe it was Facebook?). As a casual player of DnD I found this very amusing and began to spread the meme around and was pleasantly surprised by the results.

Myself? I am a True Plantser. Most of my ...

Make it So Again

There are certain story templates that we see played out over and over throughout the years, decades and centuries.

One of my favorites is the one where the Old Warrior or the Old Master is called out of retirement to rejoin the fight for one last ...

Recently I saw a performance of the Muppets' band “The Electric Mayhem” from 2009. Pretty great!

It occurred to me how many years have passed since the heyday of the Muppet Show in the late 1970's. The fact that this young-ish audience was so excited about this show said ...

Inspiration is a flighty and whimsical thing. We don't know when we'll get it and sometimes we never do when we need it. Even others, we get it when we least need it, or when we can't use it. Or when we're sleeping, and lose it ...

In a grim, gritty neon-lit Hong Kong, the world is about to explode… Teetering on the very brink of WW3 and nuclear catastrophe, the future is in the hands of one crazed amnesiac super-sexy android and a determined police detective who's trying to hunt her down. If only Lisa ...