Nathan Bransford - The Forums

Re the tangent from a few posts ago: I can honestly say that I personally make passes at girls who wear glasses. If you don't think they look good on you, by all means don't wear them, but for the moment it looks like Western culture is becoming a lot more accepting of them.

I have a big problem with sentences that just keep on going; I like semicolons way too much, and even though it's a good approximation of how people really talk, it's a good idea--according to some--to not use too many sentence variations at once (such as semicolons, hyphens, parentheses, and so on....

Reading up on American folklore, I discovered that sometime in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, a lot of industries gained a sort of superhuman patron--an ideal superhuman that applied amazing powers to being the greatest ever at their chosen task. Paul Bunyan, mascot of the logging industry,...

If anybody's been keeping track, it's been a while since I said anything much about writing; that's because my novels are all on hold until I finish up with this web-comic I'm working on. (I'm still working on my young adult series of fantasy novels based on American folklore instead of European, bu...

Writing would follow me around, bugging me about how funny it is that my new boss talks to his bum knee like it's a person ("come on, buddy, we gotta pick up this chair") or pointing out interesting synchronicities in world mythology. It would get old pretty fast. He'd usually be pretty go...

I just discovered Pinball Quest, a game that combines RPG's and pinball. Unfortunately, it's for the original NES, so there's no save button, which is not good for RPG's...

Another thing distracting me from the task of novel-writing: I have become the Cromulent Bricoleur , semi-professional collector and re-user of things. I've been doing this stuff all my life, but it's apparently a big fad just now, so I thought I'd share my ideas with the Internet. For example, I sp...

This sounds suspiciously like how Stephen King left loose ends in his books for decades and then tied them all up together with "The Dark Tower". I don't know if he had always intended to do it like that--he might have talked about it at some point, but either way I'm not sure I'd believe ...

It does sound boring based on that synopsis, but I have no doubt that it'll be good--just not in the same way as Harry Potter. I don't blame her at all; if she tried to go bigger than the HP septology she's have to write some sort of Tolkein-knockoff and keep it up for ten books, and I cannot envy t...

It would take me a while to mentally go through the entire history of animation in movies, TV shows, and the Internet, but I'm pretty sure it would have to be Dr. Facilier, the villain from "The Princess and the Frog". I love that strange mix of dancing, magic, and evilness; he's fun to wa...

bloke, git, knickers, bloody, etc. as well as some more complex phrasing. I didn't even think about how these aren't something a typical American says! I know we're talking about literature here, but...there's a scene in "Monty Python and the Meaning of Life" where John Cleese is playing ...

I saw on some other forums where people were doing similar threads with video games and movies and TV shows and so on, and some people had some pretty cool results. My own example is currently "The Lorax" and "Tall Tale America", which isn't very interesting, but I think that's b...

In "The Big Lebowski", what ended up happening to the rug that got peed on? I mean, I know he wanted to replace it after it got peed on, but I'm a little surprised he didn't just keep the old one; we're talking about a guy that didn't clean off his sunglasses after he lost them in a toilet...

I don't know how true this is, but supposedly, Albert Einstein stayed completely mute for several years when he was a child; his parents were starting to assume he was mentally retarded. Then, after his baby sister was born, young Albert--somewhere between three and six by then--approached the crib ...

What are some things that have happened that let you know you're good at writing? Personally, I'm especially proud to have written lines that make me laugh long after I've written them. Serialized publishing might not be good for the wallet, but man is it good on the ego to see complete strangers co...