Let's be honest, we don't always appreciate someone pointing out our mistakes. Criticism may be important for artists growing into their craft to find the right areas to focus on improving through a little outside guidance, but not all critique is made equal. Frankly speaking, a lot of ...

How to Pick, Research and Implement Mental Disorder in a Character

So last time I talked in general about some basic concepts and principles about what constitutes mental illness, or, more accurately, mental disorder. The important thing to remember and keep from all of that is this set of truths ...

Writing a character with mental illness can be a very tricky thing. Writers usually go for the extremely rare, exotic and spectacular: multiple personality disorders, extreme manifestations of psychopathy or sociopathy, high functioning autism with that ever alluring ‘savant’ magic going for the character, bombastically spectacular schizophrenia… in many ways ...

Seriously Funny

I didn't have a chance last week to talk about the passing of Bob Einstein, aka Super Dave Osborne, aka Marty Funkhauser.

Hilarious as Larry David's sometimes-nemesis and sometimes-friend, Marty Funkhauser, I remember him from many years ago on an old show called “Bizarre”.

The host ...

While talking about the Golden Globes last night, my best friend tells me to stop spoiling the end results. ‘Okay, I will stay in the crisper’, I responded. I should have known! A majority of people do not like endings of books or winners of award shows revealed before it ...

Oh what a coincidence, that my newspost day should fall upon the date of my 15th year on this very site! So naturally, on this anniversary, I'd like to open up and reflect on how the Duck has left a major impact on my life and work.

Every year ...

I'm not sure how many creators do it, but I often place my original characters in different settings, writing out stories about them very much like I'd write fanfiction about some established franchise.

It's even more fun when I do it mixing them up with characters from ...

If you are like 92.4% of people at the beginning of the New Year (not a factual number mind you), you have sat down with a shine in your eye to set about making a list of goals to achieve in 2019. I know I have. So far there ...

This year, I am spending New Year’s Eve Weekend in Las Vegas to watch Lady Gaga perform in concert. (In fact, as soon as this post goes live, I might still be walking up and down the strip.) I always thought the way the first day of the new ...

The first thing you need to know before we get into this discussion is the following: You can't copyright a style. It's true! Copyright protects an artist's expression of an idea, but not the ideas themselves, the technique, or procedure in making that style. Keep that in ...