Technicat

Topic

Writing

A collection of 18 issues

Len Deighton

I haven’t written many reviews on Goodreads, but I wrote a few brief ones on some of Len Deighton’s Cold War-era spy novels. His books are largely out of print (although SS-GB was recently produced as a TV series), but I often find them in libraries and used

Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay

There’s something wrong when a book on screenwriting is tedious to get through. Halfway into Andrew Horton’s Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay, I thought I would scream if I saw the word carnivalesque again. By carnival, the author refers to the mystery, progress and interaction of the developing characters

Slay the Dragon!

I got around to reading Slay the Dragon! Writing Great Video Games a while ago because I’m interested in writing, I work in game development, I met one of the authors when he was a producer at Crave Games and I worked on a game and later consulted for

What Should I Do With My Life

Like his previous work, The Nudist on the Late Shift, Po Bronson’s What Should I Do with My Life: The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question has an irresistible title. I can’t think of anyone who hasn’t had a moment of doubt about how

Comic-Con@Home

If you've been having trouble getting Comic Con tickets in recent years or just couldn't handle the crowds when it got mainstream popular, pandemic Comic Con, now streaming, is the Comic Con for you. View from home, any session, no more waiting in lines or having to choose among talks.

Save the Cat!

I've piled up a lot of unread books during the pandemic, so I've learned to treat them like other projects – if it looks like I'm not going to finish it, move on, maybe hand it off to someone else (in the case of books, the public library). Honestly, I bought

Hashnode

Before starting this ghost blog, I gave hashnode a try. I only posted twice. This was the first. My first post on a new blogging platform is typically, how did I find this thing and should I continue writing on it? Well, the answer to first question is I found

How We Know We're Alive

I only occasionally play a game and even more rarely play it more than a few minutes, much less all the way through, but How We Know We're Alive is beautifully crafted and tonally perfect. It's hard to tell with narrative games whether it's going anywhere, but the mood was

Short Story

While playing with the Ren'py visual novel engine, I tried to remember this short story from a college writing course and didn't get very far, but I'm taking another crack at it reconsituting it here. We had to write two stories – I spent the entire semester writing this one (so

DOTA: Dragon's Blood

My sister, an established comic book writer, recently got her first TV writing credit. I haven't kept up with all her work, but my favorite so far is the Sea Sirens and its sequel Sky Island, both illustrated by the Eisner-winner Janet K. Lee. They make a great team (and