Category: Writer’s Blog

Weird discovery today: the word “overwhelmed” is redundant. I mean first I was just looking up “whelmed” on writerly whim because I wasn’t 100% sure it was in the dictionary. Logically it should be, and yet I never hear someone […]
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You know, sometimes dates feel very significant to me, and other times I just think about how arbitrary they all are. Last week was January 1st in the year 2018 because a consensus of humanity decided it was so. Nothing […]
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No blog this week, folks — I am wrecked, and not even the good kind of wrecked that might have come from partying too hard on New Year’s Eve. However, nothing that some rest shouldn’t cure. Hope everyone had a […]
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So… we “have a guy,” as they say. He prepares our taxes every year. For the longest time I did my own, then several years after Dawn and I got married I did them for both of us, and then […]
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WARNING: Very, very minor spoilers for The Last Jedi referenced below. In fact so minor I wouldn’t even bother with this warning except people have been threatening to flay each other alive over revelation of any content and I like […]
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If your understanding of irony is limited to 1995 Alanis Morrisette levels (or backlash thereof) you may not be aware that there are actually different subsets of the concept. At its base concept, irony is a matter of unexpected outcomes […]
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Where “booking” in this context would be in the sense you might use it in, say, professional wrestling, i.e. “laying out in advance the general storyline…to include what the eventual outcome will be.” Trundling further along that comparison, there is […]
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Well my Turkey Day binging didn’t go quite as comprehensively as planned, though I did make it all the way through The Punisher and all the episodes of Runaways so far. I found myself actually grateful to Hulu that they […]
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It’s almost Thanksgiving here in the States, which also goes by the perhaps less controversial moniker of Turkey Day because yeah, celebrating the Native Americans and Pilgrims coming together a few hundred years ago has some problematic overtones considering what’s […]
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I remember when we first started Zombie Ranch, my ambitious intent was to use camera footage and “media interludes” for any and all instances of storytelling that were outside of the present timeline (as far as the comic’s world goes). […]
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I don’t honestly see myself as a writer who takes pleasure in cruelty to readers, and yet here we are with Darlene dying and Eustace revealed as accomplice to her murder. I mean, for some of you this may well […]
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So more thoughts on language, holding to my promise from last week. As usual I should issue the warning I am in no way formally qualified to be holding forth on linguistics. I’m no Dr. Mark Okrund, I won’t be […]
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When you’re a writer you tend to pay attention not just to words but the way people say them, and unless you’re some kind of filthy, futile prescriptivist you also should have a fascination with the way that such things […]
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I’ve been accused at times of being cruel and unusual in the fates I inflict upon the characters in this Weird New West of Zombie Ranch, and not without cause. But oh, I’m still working the bunny slopes in comparison […]
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Ah, the age of streaming video. October brings with it more than the usual glut of what I’ve (fairly or unfairly) come to call “Netflix Horror” and its rows after rows of not-quite-but-almost-amateur productions; not that I’m throwing any big […]
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Last week I was discussing how I think the greatest roadblock to being an artist is our natural tendency to not really see what’s in front of us, and how much that figuratively bites us in the ass when we […]
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I am most certainly not the artist of this pairing. My storyboards should be proof enough of that. A few years back I dared to dream that I was getting better, but facts are facts: I can still look at […]
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Dawn and I have been wrestling with terrible head colds this week. We wanted to make sure the comic was as good as we could manage since we’d been building towards this emotional sucker punch as we returned to Darlene […]
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A couple of weeks ago I talked up the praises of inserting the occasional stoicism in your absurdity, and vice-versa. I brought up the TV trope phenomenon of Mood Whiplash, where the tone shifts abruptly, and how when done right […]
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America used to be described as a “melting pot,” supposedly as a metaphor for a place where all races, colors and creeds could mix and flow together in order to create something far greater (and stronger? tastier?) than they could […]
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