So far, we’ve looked at types of explosions and how to use them in a story, and a disastrous (or hyperbolic) consequence of the explosion. Now it’s time to look a little further back: cause. Every story has a beginning, middle and end, and even if we begin with the explosion, the root explanation for…
In our discourse about explosions – a sentence I never thought I’d write – we’ve looked at the sort of explosion, the cause of the explosion, and began to look at the aftermath. Today, we’re solely focusing on how the world looks after the explosion. Literal explosions are maybe easier to imagine for this, so…
In previous posts, we’ve explored literal and emotional explosions, dire consequences and Cause & Effect, and I promised we’d explore that more as the expansion of the ‘Something Explodes’ card continues. When discussing Cause & Effect, and specifically when focusing on something so charged as an explosion, one question must be asked that, unfortunately, rings…
For National Writing Day, I made some prompt images on a whim. One set explored four small ways to get started. The focus with these was to remove excuses for how much work it might involve. The other set looked at simple ways to get creative. The aim was to remove the barriers to entry…
The big news as far as publications is concerned is that I’ve had a short story accepted into Volume 3 of the Dark Side of Purity, a zine of poetry and comics that’ll be distributed digitally to the 400+ backers of the Kickstarter. My story is called The To-Do of Hoodoo, and deals with much darker…
Is it uncouth to start a newsletter with a cover reveal? (Author note: this was originally published on my newsletter, so that opening might seem a bit odd now…) How about starting a story at the ending? Maybe a little bit cliché rather than uncouth, but we can deal with semantics at another time. For…
This past weekend, Octocon 2020 took place online. It was an opportunity to keep the convention running, even in the face of a global pandemic, spreading members’ attention across Zoom, Twitch and Discord for a free weekend celebrating fandom and genre fiction. I was fortunate to be offered a Dealer Room channel on the convention’s…