Category: Writer’s Blog

Longtime readers will know of my love for Sergio Leone’s westerns, particularly The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I may have even gone so far as to call that particular film his masterpiece. If you’re familiar with Leone’s work, […]
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Fiction writers must drive the FBI nuts. I’m thinking about the research I did just for this current sequence of pages. Guns. Pipe bombs. Ways to sabotage heavy equipment. As I sat there on one lunch break at work, casually browsing […]
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Came across one of my old college textbooks the other day. Seeing as I went to college in the early 90s, I can’t even really remember which class it was for, but it had an interesting guide to elements of […]
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So a couple weeks ago, I got “freshly pressed” for the first time. The Satellite Show, which is the blog collective I post to most every Saturday in addition to my yammerings here, is hosted on the actual WordPress.com site. One of […]
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Don’t let T.S. Eliot fool you with his excoriation of April; in the webcomic world, indeed, the online content world as a whole, April is pretty sweet. It’s August and its partners in crime, June and July, that sneak up […]
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This is going to be a weird piece of writing; a very subjective piece of writing. But then, aren’t they all? There’s this cartoon making the rounds of my Facebook acquaintances recently, produced by Shannon Wheeler of Too Much Coffee Man fame. […]
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Hang around authors of fiction long enough and you’re bound to hear one or more of them express something along these lines: “My characters have taken over my story! It doesn’t matter what I want anymore… they’re writing it for […]
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So as some of you know, we did not manage to score a Small Press table this year for Comic-Con International. We did what we could in terms of getting our paperwork and jury submission in early, but in the […]
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Two weeks ago I was discussing the movie Tremors, and among other things praising the characters for reacting to their situation in a “fairly realistic” manner. If you’re wondering what I mean by that, I guess the core of the idea could […]
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When this article goes live, it will be July 4th in most of the United States of America, a.k.a. Independence Day. It is the freedomest of freedom times, though mostly we just end up celebrating the anniversary of our declared separation […]
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I’ve been asked several times about my inspirations for Zombie Ranch. I’ve gone over none too few of them in these articles over the years, and I’ve done enough of these articles I can no longer rightly remember if I […]
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It’s always flattering when someone solicits for commentary on their work, but especially so if it’s another writer whose work you happen to respect and enjoy. If that writer also happens to be a good buddy? That’s pretty much a […]
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I wanted to talk some more about the concept of character depth in fiction. I think about this issue a lot, as evidenced most recently by my blog post from a few weeks ago on getting your audience to give […]
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I have a confession to make. The following analogy is not mine. I wish it was. “It’s almost like every webcomic is a student on a college campus; we see each other everywhere, yet rarely talk.” No, that quote comes […]
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Well, here we are at our latest cover week, otherwise known as the-break-that’s-not-really-a-break before we get started on the next chapter. I suppose we’re peculiar in that we use a placeholder in the episode we’re currently working on, then at […]
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Sometimes there are inspirations out there you don’t realize until you find that you’ve been unknowingly trodding along in their giant footsteps. For years I’d been vaguely aware there were these highly regarded independent comics being published under the title […]
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Last week I put a poll up asking what you readers would choose when faced with the same “one bullet” decision Suzie had to make. By an overwhelming margin, most of you opted for shooting Muriel. Couple that with the previous poll’s […]
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Man. Santa Claus. If there’s one thing more played out than zombies, it’s Santa Claus, am I right? Seems like every Christmas, another glut of saccharine, kid-friendly movies come out to “celebrate the season” with the same old lessons in rediscovering childhood magic […]
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Oh, you can complain, or quit reading, or both, but it isn’t really grounds for a lawsuit. What am I babbling about? Mood whiplash: when a work of fiction veers between emotional extremes so quickly it can leave your head […]
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Last week, we had a reader leave us. He (and I will presume the gender simply because I don’t feel like typing ‘they’ or some clunkier pronoun option throughout the article) expressed a lack of satisfaction with our once-a-week update […]
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