Category Archives: Uncategorized

What with Trump, and climate change, and Brexit, and Putin, and post-truth, and homelessness, and a million other problems to worry us, it’s easy to let it all get you down. Fear not: the Friday blog is here to rescue … Continue reading →

“Movies have to move. That’s why they’re called movies.” Hilarious. What a piss-taker. Evidence: It worked, though – and for that, for breaking even his own rules, we salute Mr William Golding. What lie did he tell?

This didn’t: David Mamet also eschews backstory, character histories, taxicab scenes and explanations of any kind that don’t work with the plot. Mamet’s take is that if the audience really need to know it, they’ll make it up, since that’s … Continue reading →

To misquote Alice in Wonderland, the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland, and the Crown’s too-many-to-mention other dependencies must achieve three impossible things before Brexit next Spring. The three are resolving the economic, the political, and the logical contradictions … Continue reading →

Wired has an amazing video by the chief of disguises at the CIA – yes, that really is a job. There’s a lot of good spy tradecraft in the film if that’s the type of fiction you write, and the … Continue reading →

https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/pieces-of-mars-have-landed-on-earth-97f0227f4078 … but then you already knew that…

David Thomson’s utterly brilliant How to Watch a Movie: For most of the medium’s history, movies were made to be seen once, or as many times as you could cram into a brief run… By 1955 I had been told … Continue reading →

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsundere Tsundere (ツンデレ, pronounced [tsɯndeɾe]) is a Japanese term for a character development process that describes a person who is initially cold (and sometimes even hostile) before gradually showing a warmer, friendlier side over time. The word is derived from the … Continue reading →

Here’s a story template, with hero “Alice”. (I normally name characters in a template alphabetically: Alice, Bob, Charlie, etc.) Alice lives in a small community that is dependent on a single source of income (typically tourism); Alice has some special … Continue reading →

Well, the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland, assorted dependencies and quasi-colonies – and, if you want to confuse a foreigner, ask them which has the more land area, Britain or Great Britain? – is at this moment undergoing … Continue reading →