Character DevelopmentIn the twelve months of AD 69 Rome had four emperors and three of them died violently. Around forty thousand men died in a single afternoon at Bedriacum, Romans on both sides, and the empire learned something it never unlearned.
Character DevelopmentI wrote this book because I'm angry. Angry that the information is available to anyone who looks and almost nobody in authority acts on it.
Character DevelopmentSherlockians mark January 6 as Holmes' birthday, though Conan Doyle never set one. The detective of four novels and 56 stories became the most famous in history. A look at Holmes and the case for real detection.
Character DevelopmentNational Comic Book Day celebrates the medium that taught a lot of us to love stories. I owned early Iron Man and Spider-Man issues, lost them all, and once trashed boxes of comics, and learned from all of it.
Character DevelopmentWinnie the Pooh Day is January 18, A.A. Milne's birthday. Why the simple writing in Pooh is far harder to pull off than it looks. A craft lesson.
Character DevelopmentHobbit Day is September 22. What Tolkien's hobbits teach about character and worldbuilding, an honest take from a writer who never read The Hobbit.
Book ReviewsA scholarly encyclopedia of Herbert's Dune saga, its characters, terms, and concepts, genuinely useful for scholars and devoted fans, marginal for working writers. Its real lesson is indirect: deep world-building eventually generates its own scholarship, and a complex series needs…
Book ReviewsA short booklet with a strong idea: ground your villain in the real psychology of psychopathy for a more chilling, believable antagonist, delivered with a psychologist's credibility. At thirty-five pages it is one useful prompt instead of a full treatment,…
Book ReviewsAn archetype-driven character toolkit, three earlier books combined into one. Its taxonomy of character roles is a useful prompt for building a fuller cast, but the gimmicky gendered frameworks, broad-not-deep treatment, and stitched-together structure keep it a competent minor reference,…
Character DevelopmentMost MCU villains are obstacles: something to punch before the credits. Seven exceptions prove the rule, and show what the rest got wrong.
Character DevelopmentTwenty films chosen not for being the best but for being the most instructive — each one demonstrating a specific craft technique with enough clarity that a fiction writer can extract the lesson and apply it immediately. From Chinatown's tragic…
Character DevelopmentFrom Michael Corleone to Lou Bloom — twenty-two films built around characters whose interior logic is so complete they feel more real than most living people. What makes each one work, and what writers can steal from the strongest character…
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