NOTE: In case anyone’s forgotten my generic characters’ names, “Totally” refers to “Totally Everyguy,” Average’s male counterpart. (I add this note because my own mother… Read More »Verisimilitude: A Most Essential Plot Element
Dear Readers, I come bearing gifts. Well, just one gift, actually. And I made it myself, and it’s not a cat sweater. It is a… Read More »The Gift That Keeps On Giving
What’s this? An anticlimactic plot twist? Guilty as charged! The Author-Audience Contract An unwritten contract exists between every author and their audience. The author promises… Read More »Finding the Anticlimactic Way Out
The crisis nears its end! Last week, in the midst of procrastinating a fair number of tasks, I read a book. It was a decent… Read More »A Crisis in Deciding What Matters Most
Long ago in my disaffected youth, I found great solace in the music of The Wallflowers. Fronted by singer-songwriter Jakob Dylan, this alt-rock band rose… Read More »Exhausting All Your Options
There’s an unspoken rule that fictional detectives have to be eccentric. I suppose we can blame that one on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his… Read More »Eccentric and Itching to Solve a Grand Mystery
Here’s what I don’t understand. If someone majorly screws up, why does anyone trust that same someone to correct the massive error? You may be as… Read More »The Man to Trust When the World Falls Apart
The perfect pupil for a mentor/pupil relationship, if literary tradition is any indication, fits the following template: Male Well-meaning “Ordinary” looks And it doesn’t hurt… Read More »The Right Template for the Job
I can’t, off the top of my head, think of any mentor characters who go from place to place looking for a pupil. Most mentors… Read More »How to Recruit a Proper Pupil
Sometimes the Mentor-Pupil relationship comes across more as trolling than education. Don’t get me wrong: I loves me some character manipulation. There should always be a… Read More »The Three Sworn Duties of an Epic Mentor