DONALD J. BINGLE

In the midst of my Kickstarter campaign for Frame Shop, Gail Martin offered to let me do a guest blog post on Killing Off Fictional Characters. You should all go check out Gail's website at www.disquietingvisions.com. In the course of setting up my new website and transferring over my old blogs for ... er ... posterity, I include the text below: Many years ago, an amateur graphologist told a business colleague that I was, based on my signature, a serial killer. When she assu

Went to see Transcendence last night (a better than expected four out of five stars, perhaps because it is a thinky movie and I like that it shares some themes about uploading consciousness with my first novel, Forced Conversion and saw the movie trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy, which not only looked cool, but featured the Blue Swede cover of B.J. Thomas’ Hooked on a Feeling, commonly known as the Ooga Chuka Song (or Hooga Chaka ... your spelling may vary), a number one h

Truth told, I don't like to call anyone an idiot (except for the occasional bad driver), but I'm trying to be catchier with the titles for my blog posts and, well, it must of worked, because here you are. This particular blog actually grows out of my experience as a judge on Project Publish (see earlier blogs for details), a reality show for writers and performers. One of the writers used the expression "drank the Kool-Aid" in one of her stories to denote someone who was bl

Some people say there are no new ideas in writing. I disagree--this is the kind of lazy statement made when someone sees/reads The Hunger Games and thinks back on, say, The Running Man or, better (and more obscure) yet, Series 7 (a pre-Survivor movie about a reality show where people randomly selected by social security number battle to the death in an uncontrolled environment--it makes The Hunger Games seem leisurely and non-violent). Yes, there are new ideas and they can he

Lots of the people who read this blog or follow me on Facebook or Twitter are writers--and most of the rest are pretty avid readers. Some are probably also role-playing gamers. So, when we run into one another, we tend to sometimes talk about fiction--not just about what book or game we like or why ("the pacing was slow" or "awesome effects"), but about things that happen in the book or game as if they occurred in real life. This can be especially noticeable with gamers, who

I've already blogged about serendipity in my writing career and about my reluctance to write for free, at least in situations where I am not writing to assist a charity or cause I support or am not writing to promote my other work or some aspect of my development as a writer. One way, of course, to help develop your career as a writer and to help hone your writing skills is to take on projects that are outside of your comfort zone, that introduce you to new genres, new edit

My wife and I used to go to a lot of local art fairs (before all of our available wall space was pretty well occupied). One of the things about artists is that many, many of them find a style or motif they do reasonably well and which sells well-enough to support the art fair circuit lifestyle and they stick with it. So we would see an artist tent and recognize it as the "fuzzy tree" guy or the "cows in the field" woman or whatever. Sure, we sometimes bought stuff from these