A Year of Reading: 2022

Goodreads, as is their tradition, have curated a list of all the books I read across 2022. The total number runs to 72 books, give or take a couple of titles that didn’t log properly, with another 10 books that I started across the year still “in progress” at the end. That’s a big of […]

Reboot (Hulu/DisneyPlus)

I’ve been a fan of Steven Levitan’s TV shows for years without really being aware of it. I devoured episodes Just Shoot Me as a kid, went out of my way to watch Stark Raving Mad during its brief tenure, and slowly wended my way around to an appreciation of Modern Family after writing the […]

Action, Reaction, Jackie Chan, & Gunpowder Milkshake

I often start workshops on story structure with the warning, “after this, you’ll never be able to go to the movies with non-writers again.” Lots of folks think I’m joking, but it’s essentially true: the three-act structure is the source code for an awful lot of TV and movies, and understanding its core beats means […]

Disruption, White Space, and New York City in 1979

The first lines of text of Kathy Acker’s New York City in 1979 are short and succinct: SOME people say New York City is evil and they wouldn’t live there for all the money in the world.  These are the same people who elected Johnson, Nixon, Carter President and Koch Mayor of New York. But […]

We Are All Unintentional Hypersigil Machines

We’ve been watching Doom Patrol, a television show that riffs heavily on Grant Morrison’s ground-breaking run on the comics in the late eighties and early nineties. Naturally, this sent me scurrying off to revisit Morrison’s philosophy of narrative as a hypersigil—an extension of the chaos magic philosophy of creating a glyph that codifies your intention […]

When a Fluke Gives A Moment of Respite From the World

If you haven’t not seen any of the articles about an out-of-control train being caught by the fluke of a whale sculpture, I can heartily recommend it as a temporary respite from the stress of the world right now. Go check it out. Personally, I’ve hit the point where I’ve removed all forms of social […]

Recommended: David Tennant Does a Podcast…

David Tennant Does a Podcast is a constant source of unexpectedly good advice for artists, largely because its not a podcast attempting to deliver good advice–it’s just Tennant sitting down with a bunch of talented people and asking the questions he’d like to have answered. There’s also an interesting pattern form–every season, the best episode […]

Tell Me Of Your Favourite Blog Reads

It’s been about five years since I last did a serious scouring of my RSS feeds, which means a lot of the regular incoming information is largely focused on topics that were of interest to me from 2010 to 2015. Things have changed since then, and the signal to noise ratio is becoming a little […]

Ugly Cover, Great Book: go read The Captured Ghosts Interview with Warren Ellis

The great irony of Warren Ellis: The Captured Ghosts Interviews is this: it’s an interviewer with a comics writer who thinks very carefully about the design and packaging of the written product, and yet it’s released with an incredibly ugly , half-arsed cover that’s seemingly designed to discourage purchasing. Which is a pity, because the […]

Back from Radelaide

I’ve spent the last three days in Adelaide, doing a lightning tour of Fringe Shows and generally being the bad kind of friend who doesn’t let anyone know that I was in town. Caught a total of six shows, ate a lot of great food, and hung out with the fam. The fringe is an […]

For those of you in Kindle Unlimited…

If you’re a reader with a KU subscription and a hankering for great fantasy, allow me to turn your attention to the MARCH KU FANTASY READS page assembled by dark fantasy author Melissa Padgett. It brings together seventy-odd titles that cover the spectrum from sword-and-sorcery, urban fantasy, romantic fantasy, epic fantasy, and more, all brought […]