So, apparently Barack Obama is President again…

(Note: Following is an article I wrote during my time offline, maybe hours after the 2012 election results were announced. Barack Obama is a lot like other Democrat Presidents in that he continually alternates between giving me hope and utterly disappointing me. Regardless of which way you choose to look at it, however, the events of the last few months say that change on multiple levels is needed in political systems throughout the world.)

I have been off the real Internet (that is, without a permanent connection in the place where I rest my head) for a little while. But what I saw through web pages on a ‘phone both warmed my heart and reminded me of just how sick the world I am living in really is. There have been a few different news pieces that made me blink and say “what in the unholy fukk?”, but almost all of them filter back to American President Barack Obama winning a second term.

Wanting a divorce. A consequence of bad social policy that nobody likes to talk about.

“You know, Charles, I used to think it was going to be you and me against the world,” Mystique says. “But no matter how bad the world gets, you don’t want to be against it, do you? You want to be a part of it.” Take out a few words here and there (primarily from the start), and you have the essence of what I sent in a text message to my mother whilst I was unable to sleep a handful of nights ago.

Dawn Of The Dead versus Dawn Of The Dead: How missing the point can really hurt your story

In the year 1978, George A. Romero released a film unto the world that has set many standards in terms of how horror films and films with social commentary should be made. That film was called Dawn Of The Dead, and is estimated to have grossed around fifty-five million dollars on the worldwide market, against an estimated budget of six hundred and fifty thousand.

Fantômas (aka Mike Patton is a genius, part three of many)

So I am sitting around, thinking to myself about what I am going to write next, and I think to myself “you know, Dean, you have just written about a piece of art that you enjoy by counting and laughing at all of the mistakes, so why not try writing about something you consider good or even great?”. And since I have not written about the recently-realised genius that Michael Allan Patton has been displaying over the last ten to fifteen years, why not?

The process of character construction, a reflection

When I create a character for use in my own work, merely starting the process begins a lot of asking of questions. Probably the first and foremost question when writing any story is “how important is this character going to be to the story?”. In the cases of characters like Linula and Ruby Amelda, the answer is exceedingly obvious. They are the entire basis for the story, and in one case, the story is going to be seen almost entirely through her eyes. The first of the stories in which Linula and Ruby appear is in part a meditation on the fact that the things that make us different (one is from an abusive, self-righteous asshole family, the other a loving successful commercialist family) are just as important, if not more so, than the things that make us the same. So constructing these two characters is a painstaking process in which many questions have to be asked and answered.