Ark of the Lost Angels

Recently, I had the fortune of playing What Remains of Edith Finch. The game follows Edith Finch as she returns to her family’s home, the last member of the Finch line still alive, and has to piece together what happened and uncover the nature of a mysterious family curse that…

There’s the idea held by several people that cutscenes are a method of storytelling separate from the main gameplay, and it’s lazy as a tactic. The argument is that you could excise every cutscene from a multi-hour long campaign and tell just a competent story as you could with the…

My writing is described as being heavily detailed in terms of its settings and its characters. I’d say that’s true. As a fan of movies, the little details about the world always impressed me, and I have tried to flesh out the details by continually asking “why?” Why does a…

Where to go next is a loaded question. Creative writing started for me as something that I did during my high school classes after I was caught up on taking notes to keep me occupied. Then it grew into something I did when the classes were boring, and during my…

Microfiction is tricky to write. I recently participated in a microfiction challenge, and as someone who usually tells a story in upwards of sixty-five thousand words, capturing something in sixty-five, it was incredibly challenging. However, it is a helpful skill to have. The piece I wrote was a small scene,…

Plot is important to any story. It drives characters and their development, it provides situations to react to, it tells the story, and it provides conflict to be involved with. The standard storytelling plot is the introduction and exposition, where the conflict, characters and setting are introduced; followed by the…

Recently, I wrote a piece inspired by Mary Shelley’s classic novel, Frankenstein. The novel touches on the nature of humanity, the motivations of a mad scientist, and what could the ramifications of playing god could have for humanity by telling the story of Victor Frankenstein, a man who brought to…

The short story, “The Purple Swamp Hen” the setting is a crucial part of the story. It begins with background information, with the description of Mediterranean bringing a specific idea: Italy, Greece, Turkey, etc. and the cultural tappings associated with those places. It then notes Pompeii by itself, which conjures…