Month: January 2012

Pen to Paper: Scooby-Doo and the Search for the Truth

Posted on by bryon

Chris Sims has given more thought to Scooby-Doo than ever I and fifty of my closest friends combined have done. And he has discovered some things about the cartoon that have been sitting in plain sight but haven’t previously been noticed much.

I started with Scooby-Doo when Scooby-Doo started in 1969; the show was part of my regular Saturday morning cartoonfest (back when I voluntarily woke up before noon). It didn’t take me long to understand that Daphne would get the gang deeper into trouble, that Shaggy and Scooby would alternate between making a comic stand in the face of danger and running full-tilt from that danger, and that Fred and Velma would put their heads together and think their way to solving the mystery. There was always a con-man behind the curtain who would have gotten away with his nefarious schemes had it not been for those meddling kids. Sims tells us why this works and explores its larger implications.

There’s plenty for writers to think about here. Enjoy.

Fiction: Miou-Miou

Posted on by bryon
Carver had defeated the last of the electronic security measures meant to keep people like him out of the warehouse. Now all he had to do was find a yellow box marked KLF-00391, and he could make his rendezvous and collect a cool twenty-five grand. Carver didn’t know what the yellow box contained; that wasn’t his concern. He was merely the acquisition department.

He scanned the first aisle and saw three yellow boxes. Quick checks showed they bore the wrong numbers, and he moved to the second aisle. Here, there were a couple of dozen yellow boxes, and Carver became engrossed in checking the numbers. It took him a moment to realize he was being sniffed.

Continue reading “Fiction: Miou-Miou” →

Pen to Paper: Starting the Year on the Lighter Side

Posted on by bryon

Welcome back to another year of Catsignal.

This is shaping up to be a busy year for me as I add teaching duties to my usual freelance work. Consequently, the Pen to Paper feature may become more of a weekly link or linkfest rather than deep, well-considered insight from me. But there are lots of writers with valuable things to say to us, and I’ll be pleased to help spread their words. (What the new schedule might mean for fiction on Thursdays remains to be seen. I haven’t written anything for this week yet…)

As proof, we’re going to start things off with a funny, yet perceptive, look at projects we have effectively abandoned: Twelve Ways to tell if Your Novel is Dead. I’ve got a couple of these that I might just as well admit are as finished as they’re going to get … but I don’t think I will.