Now, the good Professor always follows up his “Good News, Everyone” with decidedly bad news. But for this week, that can wait. And I was going to spend the first part of this newspost looking at some of the more depressing stories about books from around the world, but end ...

It's Resurrection Saturday today! What better occasion then than this to talk about the resurrection trope?

Usually, cancelling out a character's death is not a good thing to do in a story. It undermines the weight of the stakes involved and/or the sacrifice or seriousness of the ...

As creators of stories, be they novels or graphic novels or comics, we all have heard the adage “write what you know”. It's been drummed into our minds to the point that its cold fingers have our impostor syndrome in a deathgrip every time we venture our to write ...

If you are setting a story in the past it can often be hard to get everything from the little things to the big picture right, especially if it's a period you haven't lived through yourself. Even then, your memory can play tricks on you.

It doesn't ...

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Watching, reading, and listening to things a second, third or even a million times can offer you a whole new experience. Why do we pick up the same thing to enjoy again? It could be ...

I generally avoid using current events in my articles about webcomics, but this time I can't help it. Signalgate has been living rent free in my mind ever since the editor in chief of the Atlantic broke the story.

There are many reasons for that, most of them not ...

No matter what the characters in your story might be doing–fighting crime, resisting alien invasion, surviving in a harsh radioactive wasteland, or just working in an office–sometimes it's fun to remove them from their ‘regular’ activities and place them somewhere different and out of their social comfort ...

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Parody and satire are a certain kind of humour. They're VERY easy to do because you just base them off real, already existing things, then you twist it a bit to add humour and ...

Every year our family are gifted a very nice calendar from one of our relatives. However, it often arrives a couple of months into the year. So, I'm usually tasked with whipping up a temporary couple of months to pin to the door to use until it arrives.

This ...

I'm having to write a short speech to give at a friend's memorial service next month, and I'm finding it difficult. It's not the words that I'm struggling with, it's more the entire concept of what I'm doing. So, as a distraction from ...