More drafting for my planned deep-dive exegesis on one of my all-time favorite films, Who Framed Roger Rabbit. This is rough, disorganized, and unedited, and I will polish it up once I have a fuller draft, but here's some of the work I did on one of my favorite parts of the analysis-- the surprisingly sophisticated workings of Roger Rabbit as a ( Read more... )

This is excerpted from my upcoming article in Game Wrap Magazine, volume 2-- "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy" about the tension between narrative design and player autonomy. I pulled this part out because it's applies strucutre in all storytelling forms, not just larps.

One of the tools storytellers use to shape narrative is ( Read more... )

Just doing some early drafting of my essay analyzing Who Framed Roger Rabbit. This is all rough and somewhat cursory-- I may want to reorder some of this later. But I'm working out some of the stuff I want to talk about now, specifically how it relates to the conventions of film noir.


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In the last several years of my becoming more of a serious writing, I've developed a particular system to think about it. I've found that whenever approaching a craft, it helps my brain a lot to think of it in terms of a series of concepts with specific definitions associated with certain purposes. I believe that crucial to understanding how ( Read more... )

One somewhat controversial thing I believe about writing is that it's very good to be able to imitate other writers' styles. Other writers and scholars thereof might disagree, failing to see any practical application for it, and protesting that it's more important to refine and develop your own unique voice rather than trying to copy someone else's ( Read more... )

The most effective way of producing writing for me has always been the "vomit draft" method-- or, if you prefer a less disgusting description, the process by which you just make yourself write some garbage, no matter how badly it's coming out, until you have some semblance of a beginning, middle, and end such that you can by some measure call the ( Read more... )

I have started a new writing project recently. I'm not ready to say what it is yet. But it's one that I've been considering for a long time, not least because I've received some urging from other people to do it, but up to now I've been avoiding it. It wasn't EXACTLY what I wanted to do, it seemed like a huge investment of time and effort, and ( Read more... )

I like to look at the pieces I completed over the course of the year and see what work I did. It seems I accomplished more than I realized, at least in the screenplay department. Hood is the only wholly original full-length piece of significance, but it was also important of me to get a good version of the Mrs. Hawking screenplay done as well. Not ( Read more... )

When it comes to literary interpretation, I have a few concepts I use as guides for understanding the meaning of a work. Since I got into some discussions where people didn't necessarily see the delineations I did, I thought I'd talk about some of the concepts I use to make it clear how I approach things-- specifically as regards the impact of ( Read more... )

I am going home for Thanksgiving this year. That's a bit of a change of plans, as my family has come to my house for the past few years, but I guess the price of not having to clean is having to travel. It's a bit complicated, involving trains and handing off my car to my brother, but I'll be there for a few days. I haven't been doing so well ( Read more... )