The Fundamentals of Planning and Writing scenes — This piece was originally written for the staff writers of a project on which I was a consultant. I’ve removed the project-specific elements, and rewritten what remains so it’s universally applicable to any script. — Antony INTRODUCTION What follows are foundational principles with which many writers will already be familiar. But…

The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain (of which I’m a member, and sit on the video games committee) recently hosted a week-long series of daily online panels about writing for games, covering a variety of topics. One of the most popular was the final panel, discussing the art and process…

Before you read this, you should watch CROSSOVER POINT on YouTube. I never wanted to direct. In fact, when I was shopping around an indie spec script in 2019, several producers assumed I intended to direct, should it go forward, and I said hell no. The last thing I directed…

*** ADDENDUM TO INDUCTION MANUAL WTF-4Q-8 *** LAST REVISED 2039–10–27 Memo author: Gen. Sykes, A. L. — click here for contact database INTRODUCTION i. We understand many of you will have further questions after reading this induction manual, particularly the section to which this memo is attached. ii. This addendum…

Originally posted in Antony’s newsletter. THE TEMPUS PROJECT went off to my beta readers this week. I joked online that in some ways it’s more stressful than submitting to an editor, and I was only half-joking — for me, at least, what I send to beta readers is still very…

Originally posted in Antony’s newsletter. Talk about third-hand; there’s an old quote from Neil Gaiman, which I never heard myself but was related to me by Kelly Sue DeConnick, which was in response to someone at a Q&A. The questioner was struggling to write their first novel, and asked Gaiman…

Originally posted in Antony’s newsletter. Last weekend I was in Dublin for Writers Game, a new conference focused on bringing together writers of different disciplines — books, film, videogames, graphic novels, and virtual reality — to share our experience and learn from each other. I was asked to deliver a…

This piece was written for and first published in GIG OF MY LIFE, a zine produced to benefit the victims of the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, edited by Danny Smith. “Find your enemy, and devote your life to fighting it.” In these heightened times that may sound like an oddly aggressive thing to say, a partisan political statement that could…

Originally posted in Antony’s newsletter. As a teenager in the 1980s I fell deep into the Michael Moorcock Eternal Champion-shaped hole and burned my way through his Elric, Corum, Hawkmoon/Count Brass, and Jerry Cornelius books and stories. They were of varying quality, to be sure; Moorcock was famously prolific in…