picture books, story apps, movies, short stories
We are looking forward to offering our products to readers who don’t have access to the walled garden of Apple. The Artifacts is now available on Steam.
Steam is a digital distribution platform for purchasing and playing video games. But we are going to put interactive picture books on there. On Steam they are called visual novels.
We have now released Hilda Bewildered.
Next job, Midnight Feast.
Watch this space.
The human body is a grotesque, meaty thing. Storytellers can make use of our squeamishness by breaking the body into parts for horror or for comic effect.
In his autobiography Going Solo, Roald Dahl takes a voyage to Africa. Onboard the ship he meets all sorts of weird and wonderful characters, as Dahl was inclined to do.
One woman he met only ever ate her oranges with a knife and fork. When Dahl asked her why, she told him that she couldn’t stand fingers. Fingers disgusted her.
Sort of related: In Which We Consider The Macabre Unpleasantness of Roald Dahl, from This Recording.
Of all the phobias it’s possible to have, surely a visceral reaction to one’s own body would be one of the worst. There’s just no getting away from fingers. They’re there all the time, following you around. With fingers it pays to err on the grateful side, in fact.
Since reading We Need To Talk About Kevin I haven’t been altogether fond of eyeballs (nor lychees). This clip from the movie adaptation isn’t going to help none.
Despite being prone to suggestion, I have no such qualms about fingers. (I’m less fond of toes, especially toes with long, yellowing toenails.)
And now there’s a YouTube series which isn’t doing a hell of a lot for my appreciation of the mouth and throat region.
This is the first instalment, in case you happened to miss it.
More recently those Japanese scientists have got the damn thing to sing.
Any disembodied body part is freshly anointed as the creepiest body part. Horror stories make the most of this trope. Take the end of Child’s Play, in which Chucky’s disembodied parts just won’t quit. This makes use of the horror trope in which the villain is basically a robot who cannot be killed.
This trope also used in comedy. The Cloverfield Paradox also features a disembodied body part — an arm — but to great comic effect.
Must characters in stories be likeable? No. Are unlikeable characters popular with audiences? Yes. But they’re harder to write. What if you want to create a genuinely likeable main character who appeals to the broadest base? Here are some tips and tricks.
Trickster is one of the fundamental character archetypes. Other examples are the magician, the wise old man, the lover and so on. But of all the characters and character types, the trickster is the most popular with audiences worldwide. It goes back thousands of years:
In Children’s Literature, instead of the ‘rogue charmers’ per se, we often see child protagonists who get into trouble despite their best intentions, and who always maintain a positive attitude against all odds.
Or you can make the trickster the main opponent because of their ability to attack the hero. This is handy because it will give the hero a lot of trouble (and therefore a lot of story to work with).
Editor Cheryl Klein urges children’s authors to avoid ‘whiny protagonists without charm or truth’. The worst thing you can do is have a main character sitting around contemplating things. She sees a lot of scripts start like this when the character is about to move to a new place, so watch out for that especially if you’re writing one of those kinds of stories.
Klein writes that in children’s stories voices must have ‘authority’ — ‘a sense that the writer knows where he is going and what she is doing; the feeling that the reader is in good hands.’ She says that authority comes from three things:
Bravery, confidence and self-motivation are important for child protagonists as they are for the ‘con-man’ archetype described by Truby:
Likeable characters may be pessimistic and sardonic.
Header painting: George Bernard O’Neill – Stolen Fruit is the Sweetest
Burlesque is a type of entertainment that caricatures serious works. It is an extreme form of parody. Burlesque can be used as a verb i.e. to burlesque something.
The word derives from the Italian burlesco, in turn derived from burla – mockery. Starting in early 1700s Europe, ‘burlesque’ described musical works which juxtaposed and combined serious and comic elements. This achieved a grotesque effect.
‘Burlesque’ as a literary term became widespread in 17th century Italy and France, and later England. In literature, it was most popular during the Victorian era.
Today ‘burlesque’ is still used in music to indicate a bright or high-spirited mood, sometimes in contrast to seriousness.
Burlesque overlaps in meaning with caricature, parody and travesty and, in its theatrical sense, with extravaganza.
In modern usage, it can also mean a kind of striptease. What has this on-stage striptease got to do with the original meaning of the word? This form is more properly called ‘American Burlesque’, a genre of variety show popularised in the late 1800’s. The style was derived from the ideas of Victorian burlesque, but by the 1900s it had evolved into a combination of satire, comedy, striptease, and musical theatre. It seems the striptease was the most popular part of this ‘variety show’, and now it’s the main thing left.
In modern popular culture, the most commonly represented form of burlesque in film and television is the parody. In fact, parodies have a massive presence in the popular film industry, especially films which parody older films.
Burlesque has two distinct functions: to elevate or denigrate. 17th and 18th century burlesque was divided into two types: high and low. One elevates — the other denigrates.
A literary, elevated manner is applied to a commonplace or comically inappropriate subject matter. A high burlesque ‘elevates’.
Low burlesque applies an irreverent, mocking style to a serious subject. It denigrates its subject. Also known as ‘Mocking satire’.
Burlesque literature is much more than entertainment. It has been a major literary and dramatic technique for social activism and commentary for thousands of years; using humour to attract attention to serious and unresolved issues in society.
Burlesque can be used as a way to deliver opinions and messages to encourage change and awareness, all by presenting information through comedy that is often outrageous, unusual, and vulgar.
Burlesque makes audiences laugh because of the gap between the content and the form (the style and the substance).
Burlesque relies on the audience having prior knowledge about its subject—the writer assumes that the audience will understand the context and the theme.
Note that stories featuring cannibalism are often an indicator of burlesque sensibility.
This term refers to Greek and Roman 4th century comedy. These comedies burlesqued traditional Greek mythical stories. They did very well in the Athenian theatre, especially between 400 and 340 BCE.
Header painting: Charles Green – Her First Bouquet
Impressionism is an aesthetic movement. Art preceding this movement tended to religious and historical in nature and realistic. The golden age of Impressionism in art lasted 1876-1886.