Return to the Superversive Livestream!

It’s been a busy month, readers! Nothing attests to this fact better than the knowledge that I was on no less than two Superversive Livestreams and had little attention to spare to tell you about them. The first stream focused on Mecha and took place December 26 of last year: Sunday Superversive Livestream: All things …

Writerly Sound Bites, Number 8: Character Progression – How Characters Broken by Trauma Recover and Rebuild, Part 2

Part one of this mini-series within the Writerly Sound Bites series focused on characters who suffered abuse in childhood that affected them in a variety of ways. But that meant the topic was limited to the most vulnerable among us: children. Children are incapable of defending themselves and are thus dependent almost entirely on adults …

Writerly Sound Bites, Number 8: Character Progression – How Characters Broken by Trauma Recover and Rebuild, Part 1

If we seem to be focusing on broken characters exclusively, future authors, the reason for that is a fair number of creative writing courses and a lot of advice ties back to the sound bite I criticized here at the start of this series: the need to give characters flaws. Too often the “flaws” modern …

Bulletin: A Return to the Superversive Livestream!

Yesterday I joined Anthony Marchetta on the Superversive Livestream to discuss anime, the Pulp Revolution, and the pulp tales of yore. We spoke about many other topics as well. It was a fun two hours, readers! There were some technical difficulties with the stream, and we went silent or at least too low to hear …

The Aspirational Hero: What He Is, and How to Write Him

The Aspirational Hero is similar to, but not quite like, the Iconic Hero. Although the two resemble each other, mainly in what K.M. Weiland* refers to as the Flat Character Arc, they are not the same thing. They are, rather, two distinct archetypes that have largely gone out of fashion in the West. You are …

Some New Music

Well, for some it may be new. These are all songs to which this author was introduced recently. And before anyone asks, no, I have not played Kingdom Hearts* or any of its sequels. Video games are not something this writer has a lot of time for at the moment, as things have become a …

Pretty as a Picture

While puttering around the Internet in search of something to make her smile, this author stumbled across the picture below: I am fairly certain this is a panel from the Zoids: Chaotic Century manga*. If it is not an illustration from any particular issue, I believe it was drawn by one of the artists involved …

Reflecting on the Flashback Technique

Reese “The Devil of the Sea” is one of the best episodes in the second season of Zoids: Chaotic Century.* In this installment, minor villainess Reese confronts Fiona Elisi Linnett, the main heroine and love interest for the hero, Van Flyheight. Using her psychic abilities, Reese forces Fiona to see a vision of Van being …

A Field of Wild Flowers

This author has made no secret of her abiding affection for and interest in Zoids: Chaotic Century*, a mecha anime released in Japan in 1999 which made its way to the United States in the early 2000s. Nor has she shied away from paying homage to the series (see her story in Unbound III: Goodbye, …

Children in Fiction, Part 2: Their Characterization and Interactions with Other Characters

Last week we covered the implications which severe depopulation would present to a fictional race that regarded children as a pathology and how this relates to world-building. In the same piece where she spoke about the necessity of children in fiction, Ms. R.J. Sheffler touched on another issue plaguing their appearance in modern tales. This …