Okay, this is a semi-rant and train of thought post, because I've had a couple whiskey and I'm Having Thoughts About Things. You have been warned.

There was one thing that always bothered me in villains that monologue in movies (I also see it in how social media ...

So this line has become famous lately since Elon Musk has been using it to reinstate banned Twitter accounts in the latest episode of the Birdsite Drama.

I'm not going to get into any opinion piece on what I think of this development but if you haven't joined ...

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“Freedom” is the catch cry in so much historical fiction but it's usually an anachronistic piece of nationalist fantasy. You fought for your lord, for pay ...

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Last week we did a thing of the persistent myths of fiction- fictional conventions that we all just accept, and are repeated over and over and even ...

When I was growing up in the 80s, stories that were marketed as ‘children’s' were occasionally brutal.

Characters got maimed or killed, tortured or traumatized, met with horrid ends in worlds that were anything but rosy. And this was a pattern that wasn't limited to, say, English literature ...

Yesterday Greece's most iconic and proliferate composer, Mikis Theodorakis, passed away at the age of 96. He was a symbol for social activism and human rights. He was in the Greek resistance in 1943 as a teen, then in the anti-junta fight, he was tortured, exiled, prosecuted, and still ...

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*Cover-art from the movie poster for METROPOLIS, not Atlas shrugged :)

This Quackcast is about having political agendas in your work and expressing them well!
We're talking ...

image by Ben Burgraff

When writing a historical fiction, it's very likely that you will need to include some actual historical personalities along with your historically-adept yet fictional cast.

Depicting a historical character is hard enough when there's a general consensus among historians and popular belief about who ...

I had a meeting the other day with a director, who asked me “how do you approach a historical era to keep true to it?” and “how do you keep from being biased?”

I fear that I eclipsed the poor guy with my soap box lectures, but that aside, I ...

Soviet poster advocating atheism and science over religion

From the most ancient times, art has always been used by the ruling classes for purposes of propaganda, to propagate certain ideas about those commissioning it and their purposes: that kings are mighty, that regimes are for ever, that the enemy is ...