Category: Writer’s Blog

Yes, “I.P. Freely” is one of those names immortalized alongside compatriots such as “Ben Dover” and “Hugh Jass”. But I’m not bringing it up in prep for a prank phone call; I want to talk IP in its current sense […]
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Here we go again. Dammit San Diego Comic Con, you’re awesome, but you sure are a hotbed of plague. Actually it’s possible San Diego isn’t to blame this time around, since both my mother and my wife were both wrestling […]
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In The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams’ author insert character and narrator has a famous opening monologue to the audience, which starts thus: Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite […]
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This is probably going to end up as another one of those “personal experience masquerading as wise writerly advice” posts I seem to gravitate towards. I’ll be honest, a lot of times when I put these posts together I have no […]
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There’s at least one of my friends working as a professional author who will reflexively rage shudder if you mention the word “likeable” to him. It’s not the word itself. I mean, perhaps there are people out there prepared to […]
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I’ve talked about the concept of point of view in storytelling before, but as this week’s page prepares to go live it’s on my mind again. Have you ever considered how much of good writing is information management? Not just […]
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One thought I failed to cram into my ramblings on culture and character last week is another hypothesis that was cooking up in my brain about how to avoid shallow stereotyping. I mean, if that’s your goal. It’s not lost […]
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A longtime reader of this blog (yes, those exist!) had some communication with me after last week’s article, asking my thoughts on the idea of writing for people not just of different genders but different cultures. The problem they kept […]
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Let’s talk some more about writing good characters. Last week I talked about stripping a character down to a core, free of any trappings of race, gender, and upbringing, and then building them back up. I think that’s one useful exercise, […]
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Last week I discussed my challenges in presenting Suzie as not only a complex character but a believable leader, and how I seem to have succeeded with that by starting “inside out”, i.e. building her through personality and actions before any […]
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You know what I’ve been inordinately pleased about? In all my years of writing this comic, I have never once heard any complaints from readers about the fact that Suzie is (as Oscar would put it) the “big boss” of […]
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Sometimes I wonder if I would have an easier time writing this story if it were told exclusively, or almost exclusively from a single point of view; say for instance if Suzie were narrating the whole thing in a series of […]
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So there’s an entire entry over at TV Tropes entitled Gratuitous Spanish. I am muy aware of it, and have been since before I threw caution to the wind and decided to have Rosa’s first ever lines consist of a rather colorful expression […]
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  What’s the  image that first comes to mind when you think “comic book fan”? Is it something approximating this guy? That’s pretty much the stereotype, isn’t it? Some fat balding white guy (technically yellow here but you know what […]
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Several months back I wrote a blog about the “sounds of silence”, where I explored the way creators choose to portray (or not portray) sound effects in comic pages. I won’t rehash that entry here (that’s what the link is […]
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Sit back, compadres, and let me spin you a little tale. Y’all already know how I feel about the “hard sell” and its place at comic conventions. If you don’t, or don’t remember, here’s the harsh language rant, and here’s […]
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The comic before this one shows Chuck opening a bag of Jolly Ranchers, which are fairly readable on the bag as being such (not to mention Chuck joking about it in the comic before that). I had mentioned in the […]
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One of my favorite moments in Jaws has nothing to do with a giant shark attacking people. It’s a slow, quiet scene in a dining room between a police chief who’s had a really bad day, and his young son […]
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So here’s a thing that happens sometimes in fiction. You have a character who’s a young teenager, but a writer who’s in, say, their thirties. If said writer isn’t careful (or perhaps just flat out doesn’t care), you can end […]
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A lot of times when a work of fiction creates some sort of extreme group as antagonists, there’s not necessarily a lot of thought devoted to how they actually function or fit into the world. Where did the Gayboy Bersekers and Smegma […]
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