Your hero is not the most important character in your book. Your villain is. Are you fed up of drowning in two-dimensional villains? Frustrated with creating clichés? And failing to get your reader to root for your villain? In 13 Steps to Evil, you’ll discover: + How to develop a villain’s mindset + A step-by-step guide to creating your villain from the ground up + Why getting to the core of a villain’s personality is essential to make them credible + What pitfalls and clichés to avoid as well as the tropes your story needs Finally, there is a comprehensive writing guide to help you create superbad villains. Whether you’re just starting out or are a seasoned writer, this book will help power up your bad guy and give them that extra edge. These lessons will help you master and control your villainous minions, navigate and gain the perfect balance of good and evil, as well as strengthening your villain to give your story the tension and punch it needs. If you like dark humor, learning through examples and want to create the best villains you can, then you’ll love Sacha Black’s guide to crafting superbad villains. Read 13 Steps to Evil today and start creating kick-ass villains.

Sacha Black’s book 13 Steps To Evil – How To Craft A Superbad Villain showed writers how to create their ultimate villain in an easy and humorous, step-by-step guide. This workbook puts those lessons to use by building on each chapter in 13 Steps To Evil and guiding you through the development of your indisputable bad guy. It’s time to get to the core of your villain and supersize that evil. Inside the workbook you’ll find hundreds of thought provoking questions, exercises and creativity boosting prompts. This resource will help you: •Choose the perfect villain traits •Create sinister character histories and motives •Avoid pesky clichés •Design conflict and tension that grips your reader •Build your market knowledge so you create a villain that sells Craft your characters through easy to digest exercises that empower you to conquer your villain for life. Read the 13 Steps To Evil Workbook today and start creating kick-ass bad guys.

Do your sentences fail to sound the way you want? Are they lackluster, with flat characters and settings? Is your prose full of bad habits and crutches? In The Anatomy of Prose, you’ll discover: A step-by-step guide to creating descriptions that sing The key to crafting character emotions that will hook a reader How to harness all five senses to make your stories come alive, deepening your reader's experience Tips and tricks for balancing details at the sentence level Methods for strengthening each sentence through strategic word choice, rhythm and flow Dozens of literary devices, and how to utilize them to give your prose power Tactics for differentiating characters in dialogue as well as making it punchy and unforgettable A comprehensive prose-specific self-editing check list How to embody your character's personality at the sentence level The most common pitfalls and mistakes to avoid The Anatomy of Prose is a comprehensive writing guide that will help you create sensational sentences. Whether you’re just starting out or are a seasoned writer, this book will power up your prose, eliminate line-level distractions and help you find the perfect balance of show and tell. By the end of this book, you'll know how to strengthen your sentences to give your story, prose and characters the extra sparkle they need to capture a reader's heart. If you like dark humor, learning through examples and want to create perfect prose, then you’ll love Sacha Black’s guide to crafting sensational sentences. Read The Anatomy of Prose today and start creating kick-ass stories.

From best-selling author Barbara Coloroso comes a timely and essential book about genocide. Through an examination of three clearly defined genocides — the Armenian and Rwandan genocides, and the European Holocaust — Coloroso deconstructs the causes and consequences, both to its immediate victims and to the fabric of the world at large, and proposes the conditions that must exist in order to eradicate this evil from the world. Coloroso is well known for her best-selling books that explore why children bully. In Extraordinary Evil she builds upon that research to explain why the impulse to bully is mirrored by the act of genocide. By linking the psychology of the bully to the motivation that leads a community to murder, Coloroso provides devastating and vital insight into why people kill their neighbors. Based on the author's 15 years of research and extensive travel, Extraordinary Evil is an urgently needed work in an age when acts of genocide seem to occur more frequently and are in the public's consciousness more than ever before.

Sin. Many Christians today have lost the ability to talk about it in personal terms. For the last quarter century the theological establishment, like society, has consigned the human predicament to structures of political and economic oppression or to systemic evil such as race and gender discrimination. In the process, people have lost interest in the internal workings of the human soul, attributing the evils of our world to social forces beyond the scope of personal responsibility.

The definitive firsthand account of the groundbreaking research of Philip Zimbardo—the basis for the award-winning film The Stanford Prison Experiment Renowned social psychologist and creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment Philip Zimbardo explores the mechanisms that make good people do bad things, how moral people can be seduced into acting immorally, and what this says about the line separating good from evil. The Lucifer Effect explains how—and the myriad reasons why—we are all susceptible to the lure of “the dark side.” Drawing on examples from history as well as his own trailblazing research, Zimbardo details how situational forces and group dynamics can work in concert to make monsters out of decent men and women. Here, for the first time and in detail, Zimbardo tells the full story of the Stanford Prison Experiment, the landmark study in which a group of college-student volunteers was randomly divided into “guards” and “inmates” and then placed in a mock prison environment. Within a week the study was abandoned, as ordinary college students were transformed into either brutal, sadistic guards or emotionally broken prisoners. By illuminating the psychological causes behind such disturbing metamorphoses, Zimbardo enables us to better understand a variety of harrowing phenomena, from corporate malfeasance to organized genocide to how once upstanding American soldiers came to abuse and torture Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib. He replaces the long-held notion of the “bad apple” with that of the “bad barrel”—the idea that the social setting and the system contaminate the individual, rather than the other way around. This is a book that dares to hold a mirror up to mankind, showing us that we might not be who we think we are. While forcing us to reexamine what we are capable of doing when caught up in the crucible of behavioral dynamics, though, Zimbardo also offers hope. We are capable of resisting evil, he argues, and can even teach ourselves to act heroically. Like Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, The Lucifer Effect is a shocking, engrossing study that will change the way we view human behavior. Praise for The Lucifer Effect “The Lucifer Effect will change forever the way you think about why we behave the way we do—and, in particular, about the human potential for evil. This is a disturbing book, but one that has never been more necessary.”—Malcolm Gladwell “An important book . . . All politicians and social commentators . . . should read this.”—The Times (London) “Powerful . . . an extraordinarily valuable addition to the literature of the psychology of violence or ‘evil.’”—The American Prospect “Penetrating . . . Combining a dense but readable and often engrossing exposition of social psychology research with an impassioned moral seriousness, Zimbardo challenges readers to look beyond glib denunciations of evil-doers and ponder our collective responsibility for the world’s ills.”—Publishers Weekly “A sprawling discussion . . . Zimbardo couples a thorough narrative of the Stanford Prison Experiment with an analysis of the social dynamics of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.”—Booklist “Zimbardo bottled evil in a laboratory. The lessons he learned show us our dark nature but also fill us with hope if we heed their counsel. The Lucifer Effect reads like a novel.”—Anthony Pratkanis, Ph.D., professor emeritus of psychology, University of California

Do your sentences fail to sound the way you want? Are they lackluster, with flat characters and settings? Is your prose full of bad habits and crutches? The Anatomy of Prose: 12 Steps to Sensational Sentences, by Sacha Black, showed writers how to polish their prose to perfection in an easy and humorous, step-by-step guide. This workbook puts those lessons to use by building on each chapter in The Anatomy of Prose, guiding you through the development of your sentence-level craft. Inside the workbook you’ll find hundreds of thought provoking questions, exercises and creativity boosting prompts. This resource will help you: + Create descriptions that sing + Craft character emotions that will hook a reader + Harness all five senses to make your stories come alive, deepening your reader's experience + Learn tips and tricks for balancing details at the sentence level + Discover methods for strengthening each sentence through strategic word choice, rhythm and flow + Implement dozens of literary devices, including how to utilize them to give your prose power + Use tactics for differentiating characters in dialogue as well as making it punchy and unforgettable + Self-edit through a comprehensive prose-specific self-editing check list + Embody your character's personality at the sentence level + Avoid the most common pitfalls and mistakes at the sentence level Read the The Anatomy of Prose Workbook today and start creating kick-ass sentences.