Month: March 2012

Serendipite Studios Selected for Prestigious NYC Showcase

Kathy Meis, Founder of Serendipite Studios

Serendipite Studios of Mount Pleasant is one of twelve new companies in the United States selected as a finalist for the O’Reilly Publishing Startup Showcase. The competition is part of O’Reilly’s Tools of Change Publishing Conference in New York City on February 13 -15, 2012.

Frustrated with current economic models in publishing, Founder and CEO Kathy Meis started Serendipite Studios about a year ago with a mission to protect quality literature and journalism. In late December 2011, the company introduced Pappus, a revolutionary book discovery tool that enables authors and publishers to blog directly from their books and reach their readers in seconds.

“Digital books are technically giant web pages. You can do amazing things with them,” says Meis. “Our goal is to help authors and publishers engage with readers from within their books without interrupting the reading experience.” A writer herself, Meis spent a year studying the problems facing authors and readers. The biggest problem she found was discovery. Continue reading “Serendipite Studios Selected for Prestigious NYC Showcase”

The Horror… The Horror…

“Horror… Horror has a face… and you must make a friend of horror.” Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now

You’d think that horror would be one of the easiest of genres within which to write: create a protagonist who is either extremely likeable or go for the opposite, a character deserving of some particularly overdue and nasty payback; either invent or import a monster from Familiar Horror Trope Land (sparkly or not, preferably the latter); bring them together in some unexpected location and everything gets all squishy and liquidized and unpleasant and the audience members lose all control of their bodily functions and curse your parents… except that’s not necessarily what happens at all. Horror is hard to write. Okay, no, I just lied. Horror is easy to write, but good horror is hard to write. Continue reading “The Horror… The Horror…”

Character Creation by Arline Chase

Killraven by Arline ChaseI have seen a number of “character planning sheets” some in courses I have taken and others in courses I have taught, but over the years found they all needed a bit of a refocus, to refine motivation as to why the character acts as he or she does.

This is the list of questions I came up with for my own character work sheets.

Who IS Your Character?

Plot should come out of character, evolving naturally from each character’s beliefs and desires. To understand your characters’ feelings, take a look at the events that shaped their lives. Look first at the character’s emotional life, then at world events they may have experienced. Continue reading “Character Creation by Arline Chase”

Video Trailer: The Judas Syndrome Trilogy by Michael Poeltl

This is the video trailer for Michael Poeltl’s post-apocalyptic trilogy,  The Judas Syndrome.


The first two installments in the  The Judas Syndrome Trilogy are available at Amazon.com.

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