Get to Know Your Character's Sinister Side A truly memorable antagonist is not a one-dimensional super villain bent on world domination for no particular reason. Realistic, credible bad guys create essential story complications, personalize conflict, add immediacy to a story line, and force the protagonist to evolve. From mischief-makers to villains to arch nemeses, Bullies, Bastards & Bitches shows you how to create nuanced bad guys who are indispensable to the stories in which they appear. Through detailed instruction and examples from contemporary bestsellers and classic page-turners, author Jessica Page Morrell also shows you how to: • Understand the subtle but key differences between unlikeable protagonists, anti-heroes, dark heroes, and bad boys • Supply even your darkest sociopath with a sympathetic attribute that will engage readers • Set the stage for an unforgettable standoff between your hero and your villain • Choose the right type of female villain—femme fatale, mommy dearest, avenger, etc.—for your story Bullies, Bastards & Bitches is your all-encompassing bad-guy compendium to tapping into any character's dark side.

This book describes the horrors of our family which started during World War II in Germany, and continued for years thereafter because our father abandoned us. After twenty court processes, involving two dozen lawyers and judges, our family lost everything. My little brother, Siggi, and I suffered severe illnesses, starvation and homelessness. When we were about five and seven, our mother forced us to scavenge pig's innards from a manure pile. With the ever-present wire whip that she usually kept pinned to her skirt, she enticed us to eat them. A judge evicted us from our home. On Christmas Eve Day. For one year we squatted in a stranger's attic without water, sewer, heat, power or hope. When we were fourteen and sixteen, our relatives invited us to America. We now thought that our lives would improve: Cowboys and Indians! But when we later arrived on their dairy farms, they enslaved us. I was not allowed to bathe but once a year. At the age of twenty-one, I still lived without water, heat, power, or outhouse. After we finally escaped, Siggi and I worked our way through college, became American citizens and world travelers.

The villain's journey is rare in popular culture--most characters are fully-formed tyrants with little to no story arc. However, a few particularly epic series take the time to develop complex villains, including Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Smallville, Babylon 5, Game of Thrones, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Increasingly, villains' origin stories have found new popularity through films like Wicked, Maleficent, and Despicable Me, alongside shows starring serial killers and Machiavellian schemers. This book examines the villain's decline and subsequent struggle toward redemption, asking why these characters are willing to cross moral lines that "good" characters are not. The first half follows characters like Loki, Jessica Jones and Killmonger through the villain's journey: an inverse or twisted version of scholar Joseph Cambell's hero's journey. The remainder of this book examines the many different villainous archetypes such as the trickster, the outcast, the tyrant, or the misunderstood hero in greater detail. Written for writers, creators, fans, and mythologists, this book offers a peek into the minds of some of fiction's greatest villains.

95 million adults have a step relationship, according to a 2011 report. That’s 95 million unexpected experiences; 95 million unique perspectives; 95 million laughs, 95 million tears, and 95 million new families. Blended explores stepfamilies from the inside out through the perspectives of thirty writers who know what it’s like first hand. Sometimes funny, often poignant, and always deeply personal, the stories in Blended capture the essence of stepfamilies in all of their weird and wonderful varieties. The journeys range from the first encounters between new step-relatives, to marriages, honeymoons, daily experiences, and divorces. The diverse voices in Blended reflect the realities of today’s world, in which yesterday’s ideas of family structures and types just don’t cut it anymore. Parents, children, siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins: all of these relationships change when families are melded into one, and the writers of Blended help explore the truth of what these new relationships look like, and, especially, feel like. Blended offers something for everyone: laughter, wisdom, empathy, and guidance, and, above all, the knowledge that you are not alone.

Masculinity and Patriarchal Villainy in the British Novel: From Hitler to Voldemort sits at the intersection of literary studies and masculinity studies, arguing that the villain, in many works of contemporary British fiction, is a patriarchal figure that embodies an excess of patriarchal power that needs to be controlled by the hero. The villains' stories are enactments of empowerment fantasies and cautionary tales against abusing patriarchal power. While providing readers with in-depth studies of some of the most popular contemporary fiction villans, Sara Martín shows how current representations of the villain are not only measured against previous literary characters but also against the real-life figure of the archvillain Adolf Hitler.

The face, being prominent and visible, is the foremost marker of a person’s identity as well as their major tool of communication. Facial disfigurements, congenital or acquired, not only erase these significant capacities, but since ancient times, they have been conjured up as outrageous and terrifying, often connoting evil or criminality in their associations – a dark secret being suggested "behind the mask," the disfigurement indicating punishment for sin. Complemented by an original poem by Kenneth Sherman and a plastic surgeon’s perspective on facial disfigurement, this book investigates the exploitation of these and further stereotypical tropes by literary authors, filmmakers, and showrunners, considering also the ways in which film, television, and the publishing industry have more recently tried to overcome negative codifications of facial disfigurement, in the search for an authentic self behind the veil of facial disfigurement. An exploration of fictional representations of the disfigured face, this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, cultural and media studies, American studies and literary studies with interests in representations of disfigurement and the Other.