They say that reading is part of writing, so I think I can count some of my recent reading as work on “Felix”. I’ve read a bunch of stuff about Lovecraft and ancient astronauts recently, which is something touched on in my story. Pseudoscience When I first learnt of Erich von Däniken’s “Chariots of the… Read Article →
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Much of the humour in the comic strip “Dilbert” is based on one of the characters demonstrating ignorance without being aware of their ignorance. This behaviour has a name, The Dunning–Kruger Effect, and in real life it makes my blood boil. What is The Dunning–Kruger Effect? “… ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge”… Read Article →
Lately, while procrastinating about “Felix”, I’ve thought about some old ideas that I could use to create new stories. One of these is what I call Virtual Parliament, where electronic communication is used to change the way parliament works. One of the problems with governing a large country like Canada, is that members of parliament… Read Article →
As I continue to struggle with writer’s block, I ask myself, why do I want to write “Felix”? Maybe that will get me restarted. On one level a story can be just a story; an exercise in entertainment. But to write a story a writer needs motivation. What is my motivation? In general I see… Read Article →
Conflict is an important part of story telling. Fortunately for the writer, there is no shortage of conflict to draw from. Recent reports about plans to evaluate teachers illustrates one of the conflicts I had in my work in transportation planning. Conflict in Transportation Planning For much of my career in Transportation Planning I advocated… Read Article →
I got back to work on “Felix” this week. My approach now is to go back over the themes of the story and the characters to clarify what I want to say. I planned to talk about that in my blog this week, but I wasn’t sure how much I want to reveal. In the… Read Article →
This week I came across a YouTube video: The Bechdel Test for Women in Movies. The goal is to test for women presence in a movie. I applied the test to my movie “The Barrier”. What is the Bechdel test? The Bechdel test has been around for some time, but I wasn’t aware of it… Read Article →
I started on a new story this week. That means I didn’t work on the rewrites of my other story. My life responsibilities also took me off my projects this week. I have a bad habit. When I am stuck on a project, rather than getting down to work on it, I take a side… Read Article →
I continued to use the STATE animation program to help me rewrite “Felix” this week. I finished a couple of scenes. I made a few changes to the scene I started on last week. In it the two astronauts explore “the target area”. Then I extracted the dialogue from the STATE file. STATE stores the… Read Article →
I actually got back to work on “Felix” this week. I think my idea to use the animation program STATE to help me write will work. A couple of weeks ago I installed the animation program STATE on my computer. It is a hacked version of the Xtranormal program. I was reluctant to use it… Read Article →
