Morality Sopranos Style

I’ve recently returned to watching The Sopranos and I find it oddly still resonating 13 years after it ended. As a fan of mob stories I shouldn’t be too surprised, but in such changed world from the start of the millennium I do find it interesting. Maybe nothing’s changed, maybe everything has, but one thing……

The Key to Great Character Introductions

I spotted this gem on the interwebs. It comes from Nathan Bransford’s awesome blog. https://blog.nathanbransford.com/2020/01/nail-every-characters-first-impression This has some great advice for introducing characters and is something I know I fumble a bit with. It’s really important to make everything a part of the story. Nobody wants to read through pages of stuff that the writer……

My Female Characters Need Help

I saw this in the blog-o-shpere, https://bookriot.com/2018/04/24/male-novelist-female-characters/, and it reminded me how much work I have to do on my female characters.  I rely on my editors to help me when I really go off the rails. Sadly that is more often than not, especially with the little things. I often thought if it would be……

Are Your Bad Guys Bad Enough?

I am sitting in my office thinking on how busy I’ve been this summer and looking at a poster on my wall. The poster is from a video game released in 2005 for the Sony Playstation 2 called Shadow of the Colossus. The premise of the game is that you control a boy who must……

Superheroes Rule

I caught the matinee showing of The Avengers this weekend. I was glad to see the hype is well deserved and then some. Then again as a fan of Joss Whedon I had high hopes and figured I wouldn’t be let down. I don’t want to send this post going on about the movie. Instead……

Vampires, it’s Because They Suck

I recently saw the trailer for the movie remake of Dark Shadows. Seeing Johnny Depp as Daytime TV’s favorite vampire Barnabas Collins had me thinking about the continued popularity of vampires in fiction. The birth of vampire lore is easy to understand when viewed against what was understood of medicine and science in medieval times. Since the……

New Character

It’s funny how things happen. Last night while my wife and I trolled Facebook she came across a post that influenced me to rewrite one of the characters in my new novel. I had originally planned this character to be a love interest of the main character, Constable Darrow, but that wasn’t working out so……

14 Do’s and Don’ts for Introducing your Protagonist

This is another great post from Anne R. Allen’s blog I’ve come close to breaking a few myself. http://annerallen.blogspot.com/2011/09/14-dos-and-donts-for-introducing-your.html