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# Broken English Books: Original Screenplay eBooks

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## Posts
- [Why the Best Plot Twists Do Not Reveal New Information, They Reframe Everything.](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/why-the-best-plot-twists-do-not-reveal-new-information-they-reframe-everything/): A good plot twist is not a fact. It's an argument with the reader's memory.
- [The Secret Language of Fans: Romantic Myth or Baroque Reality?](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-secret-language-of-fans-romantic-myth-or-baroque-reality/): Quick answer: No. The famous "secret language of fans" is a myth. It was invented in the 1850s by Parisian fan maker Jules Duvelleroy as an advertising gimmick, not a real code used by Baroque or Victorian aristocrats. Below is the real history, and how the myth caught on anyway.
- [How Your Brain Detects Fear, Calm, and Everything In Between: A Guide to Neuroception](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/how-your-brain-detects-fear-calm-and-everything-in-between-a-guide-to-neuroception/): When we say someone "sets off alarm bells in our head," it's no figure of speech. Humans have an uncanny knack for sensing unspoken tension. The moment a hostile glare, an urgent tone, or even a slight tremor in voice enters a room, we often feel it, sometimes before we even consciously recognize what it was. This intuition isn't magic. In neuroscience terms, it's called neuroception, a hidden system that continuously scans our environment and our own bodies for cues of safety and danger. Stephen Porges coined this term in the 1990s to describe how the brain unconsciously evaluates safety. Polyvagal theory, which Porges developed, posits that the autonomic nervous system has layered responses: the newest social-engagement circuits give way to fight-or-flight circuits when danger is detected. Neuroception is the traffic light governing these layers, deciding whether we can stay social or must mobilize.
- [Coin Clipping and Currency Fraud: The Dark Side of Medieval Money](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/coin-clipping-and-currency-fraud-the-dark-side-of-medieval-money/): In the age of sail and caravan, money was as tangible as the silver in your purse. An Ottoman sarraf (money-changer) in an 18th-century Istanbul bazaar would heft every coin on a balance and judge it by its ring and signature. A trader in Paris might line up Spanish "pieces of eight" on a counter, comparing weight and wear against French livres.
- [How Operant Conditioning Shapes Trauma Responses and Recovery](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/how-operant-conditioning-shapes-trauma-responses-and-recovery/): In our daily lives, the rewards and rebukes often come in whispers. A teacher's approving smile, a partner's encouraging tone, even a stranger's raised eyebrow - these subtle cues guide our choices long before we think about them. Psychologists call this phenomenon operant conditioning, a principle first articulated by B.F. Skinner: behaviors followed by satisfying consequences tend to recur, while those followed by unpleasant consequences tend to fade. In short, when an action yields a reward, we do it again; if it yields a penalty, we tend to avoid it. From the clink of coins in a slot machine to a dog learning a trick, this law of effect governs both the simple and the complex acts of life.
- [Community Justice in Medieval Shetland: No Jails, Just Neighbors](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/community-justice-in-medieval-shetland-no-jails-just-neighbors/): In the mid-1500s, Shetland's justice was dispensed in the open air. In Tingwall Loch lies Law Ting Holm, "the site of the last Ting held in Shetland", a small island accessed by a man-made causeway. Until the early 1600s, this was the island's Supreme Court: an annual assembly of freeholders and officials meeting under the old Norse code. Four great stones on the holm (now dismantled) once served as judges' benches. Here, villagers presented complaints and disputes; offenders could be tried or given safe conduct to church. As one 19th-century observer noted, even "now" (in his day) Shetlanders boasted that "old Norwegian laws are ... administered at open courts of justice" called Lawtings. In practice the Lawting at Tingwall was where the broad norms of Shetland law were proclaimed and contested, a vestige of a Viking past held over the hearths of fishermen and farmers.
- [Revision Block Is Real: How to Use Cognitive Science to Write Better Drafts](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/revision-block-is-real-how-to-use-cognitive-science-to-write-better-drafts/): Importantly, conquer the perfectionist impulse lurking in revision. Psychologists note that fear of judgment or failure often masquerades as mental fog. One remedy is metacognition: step outside of the text and talk about your blocks. If you notice frustration (fatigue signs, irritability, scattered focus), give yourself permission to rest or segment the task. It helps to adopt a growth mindset toward revision: not as evidence of writerly deficiency, but as a normal phase of writing. Helen Vendler, the great poetry critic, taught poets to approach each line obsessively, a lesson equally apt here. Similarly, the quip of essayist Louisa Thomas is instructive: "I rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite. In fact, I don't think I'm a writer. I'm a rewriter." Her tongue-in-cheek advice for every stuck novelist or scholar is the simplest mantra: "Revise. Revise. Revise. And revise." This relentless attitude reframes revision block as a signal to lean in, not quit.
- [How to Write a Plot Twist That Readers Will Never See Coming (But Should Have)](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/how-to-write-a-plot-twist-that-readers-will-never-see-coming-but-should-have/): Twists feel like magic: they take a brain we thought we had fully hooked, and yank the rug right out from under it. The classic cliché of a plot twist is that last-minute revelation: the killer who was the butler, the protagonist actually a spy all along, the narrator who turns out to be dead. Yet in reality, a "twist" can happen anywhere in a story (not just at the end), and it needn't be some gimmicky contrivance. Effective twists are organic; they reconfigure everything that came before in a way that feels both surprising and inevitable. As cognitive scientist Vera Tobin puts it, a successful twist must introduce "some new information override an old understanding," while still making sense in hindsight. In other words, the reveal has to snap into place. Even though we didn't see it coming, once it lands we ought to kick ourselves for not noticing the clues. The reader may even re-read the whole story to hunt those clues down.
- [Enlightenment Hypocrisy: Class, Sex, and Power in Habsburg Law Enforcement](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/enlightenment-hypocrisy-class-sex-and-power-in-habsburg-law-enforcement/): In the Habsburg lands of late Enlightenment and Restoration, policing public morality became a paramount state project. Building on Joseph II's reforms, officials created a new tier of "police delicts" - minor public-order offenses - apart from serious crimes.
- [Dying Brain Mysteries: Why Terminal Lucidity Occurs in Final Hours](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/dying-brain-mysteries-why-terminal-lucidity-occurs-in-final-hours/): This is terminal lucidity: a brief return of mental clarity and memory just before death. In medical terms it's often called "the surge", an unexpected burst of energy and awareness at life's end.2 It's not common, and not everyone has even heard the phrase, but hospice nurses and geriatric doctors have seen it often enough to regard it as real. In fact, about one in three experienced palliative-care workers report witnessing at least one such rally in the past year.3 For the families who see it, it feels both miraculous and heartbreaking, a ghostly wink from a mind that seemed forever lost.
- [Anhedonia: Why Millions of Americans Have Lost the Ability to Feel Pleasure](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/anhedonia-why-millions-of-americans-have-lost-the-ability-to-feel-pleasure/): In a country brimming with entertainment, the latest gadgets, and endless "stuff," millions of Americans quietly report a singular emptiness. They can't enjoy life's pleasures the way they used to. From music and sex to family dinners and Netflix binges, what once delighted now feels strangely flat or uninteresting. This is not laziness or moral failing; it's a medical symptom called anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure. Once a term buried in 19th-century psychiatric texts, today anhedonia is increasingly recognized as a public-health crisis in the United States. It is both a symptom and a metaphor for our era: a dulling of life's color amid unprecedented abundance.
- [The Neuroscience of Empathy: How Mirror Neurons, Yawning, and Trauma Are Connected](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-neuroscience-of-empathy-how-mirror-neurons-yawning-and-trauma-are-connected/): In a crowded lecture hall or a quiet therapy room, a single yawn can ripple through an unsuspecting audience. One colleague tilts their head, eyes half-closed. The murmur of insight in the room falls silent, and suddenly yawns pass from one mouth to the next like a contagion. This everyday phenomenon turns out to have little to do with a lack of oxygen or boredom, and everything to do with how our brains echo each other's states. Neuroscientists now attribute this synchrony to mirror neurons: specialized brain cells that fire both when we act and when we see others act. In effect, our brains are wired to mirror the actions, emotions, and even the yawns of those around us.
- [The Complete Guide to Pirate Stereotypes: What’s Real and What’s Made Up](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-charme/): To most, a pirate is a walking stereotype: a grizzled figure with a peg leg, screaming "Avast!" and clutching a pistol in one hand and a bottle of rum in the other. That vision owes more to novels, stage plays and movies than to actual logs from the 17th-century Caribbean. In fact, many signature pirate clichés only emerged long after the Golden Age had passed.
- [What Created the Dragon Legend? Evolution, Fossils, and Human Fear](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/what-created-the-dragon-legend-evolution-fossils-and-human-fear/): Every January, in cities from Beijing to Birmingham, shimmering dragon puppets and fiery lanterns herald the Lunar New Year, the Year of the Dragon. Yet in the modern age we know there are no real dragons. So where did our ancestors get the idea for these colossal, fire-breathing reptiles in the first place? As Smithsonian Magazine reported during the Year of the Dragon, scholars note that belief in dragons "evolved independently in both Europe and China, and perhaps in the Americas and Australia as well." Almost every culture that wrote myths seems to have invented something like a dragon. How could such similar beasts arise across the globe? Anthropologists, folklorists and even paleontologists have offered explanations ranging from fossil misinterpretations to the inner wiring of the human brain. What follows is a journey through time and cultures to untangle the legends of dragons, from ancient fossil beds to today's fantasy epics.
- [Why You’re Always Tired: The Science Behind Sleep Deprivation and Mood Disorders](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/why-youre-always-tired-the-science-behind-sleep-deprivation-and-mood-disorders/): Physiological repair happens mostly at night. Major restorative processes (protein synthesis, tissue repair, release of growth hormone) occur almost exclusively during sleep. Burning the midnight oil disrupts the hormones that regulate metabolism. Sleep deprivation shifts key hormones, reducing satiety signals and raising appetite hormones, making us hungrier and more insulin-resistant.
- [Lonely Hearts for Hire: The Rise of Professional Friends, Paid Companionship and Fake Families](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/lonely-hearts-for-hire-the-rise-of-professional-friends-dates-and-fake-families/): The market for paid companionship comes in many forms. In Asia it ranges from renting fake family members for weddings to hiring escorts with a strict "no sex" policy. In the West it looks like paid cuddle-therapy or "rent-a-friend" platforms. Common threads run through them all: clients seeking emotional support or social cover, and providers offering empathy, conversation or company, all for a fee.
- [How Toulouse Ate in 1992: A Look Back at France’s Pink City Cuisine](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/how-toulouse-ate-in-1992-a-look-back-at-frances-pink-city-cuisine/): In the spring of 1992, Toulouse awoke under warm pink skies. The clay bricks of Place du Capitole first glow golden as dawn breaks, and vendors at the Victor Hugo Market fill wooden crates with local delicacies.1 In France's southwest, where Toulouse is known as La Ville Rose, this is no place for a "pain au chocolat" - here only the word chocolatine suffices, along with baskets of crystallised violets and smoked Toulouse sausages lining the stalls.1
- [Is Demonic Possession Real? Psychiatrists and Priests Weigh In](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/is-demonic-possession-real-psychiatrists-and-priests-weigh-in/): For outsiders, exorcisms often seem confined to horror films or medieval superstition. Yet Catholic clergy today speak of an astonishing surge in requests for deliverance rituals. "The Vatican does not track global or countrywide exorcism, but in my experience...demand is rising," writes Dr. Richard Gallagher, a psychiatrist who advises dioceses on alleged possession.1,2 In Indiana, Father Vincent Lampert, the archdiocese's official exorcist, reports receiving about 20 pleas per week, roughly twice his caseload in 2005.1
- [The Dark History of Zombies: From Haitian Slavery to The Walking Dead](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-dark-history-of-zombies-from-haitian-slavery-to-the-walking-dead/): On a spring day not long ago, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a cheeky guide on how to survive a zombie apocalypse. It was an unlikely endorsement of a monster that had shambled out of superstition and into the mainstream. Around the same time, millions of viewers were tuning in to TV shows like The Walking Dead, which at its peak drew roughly 20 million viewers per episode. Zombies have invaded every corner of pop culture, from comics and video games to university courses and protest slogans, a far cry from their mysterious origins. Once a bone-chilling legend born of colonialism and sorcery, the zombie has become a modern archetype, equal parts horror and blockbuster spectacle. Its journey from Haitian cane fields to Hollywood backlots is a story of cultural transformation and enduring fascination.
- [Wakaresaseya Exposed: Japan’s Underground Industry That Pays Strangers to Seduce Your Spouse](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/wakaresaseya-exposed-japans-underground-industry-that-pays-strangers-to-seduce-your-spouse/): Kuwabara, it turned out, was no ordinary adulterer. He was a wakaresaseya (literally a professional "breaker-upper"), hired by Isohata's husband to seduce her and provide grounds for divorce. The charming stranger who had approached the lonely housewife in the supermarket aisle was in fact a paid agent on a mission to destroy her marriage. Their "chance" meeting over cheesecake had been carefully engineered, and a colleague secretly photographed their ensuing affair so that Isohata's husband could later use the evidence in court.
- [South Boston’s Dark Secret: Inside the Irish Mob’s Century of Violence](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/south-bostons-dark-secret-inside-the-irish-mobs-century-of-violence/): The cataclysm came in early 1961: a Winter Hill gangster's eyeing of an Irish Catholic girlfriend triggered a vendetta. George McLaughlin assaulted one of Howie Winter's men; his brother Bernie demanded that Somerville's boss, Buddy McLean, hand over the attackers. McLean's refusal ignited the "Irish Mob War," a seven-year turf battle between Boston's two dominant Irish gangs.
- [The Dark Side of the Celtic Tiger: Dublin’s Late 90s Addiction Epidemic](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-dark-side-of-the-celtic-tiger-dublins-late-90s-addiction-epidemic/): Dublin in the late 1990s was a city suspended between renaissance and ruin. Chic cafés and glassy office blocks began sprouting up across the city center as Ireland's Celtic Tiger economy roared to life, but in the shadow of this gleaming prosperity lay a very different Dublin.1 Along the River Liffey and in the huddled rows of inner-city housing estates, an older struggle continued: one of quiet mental anguish and an unabating war with drugs. On a damp autumn evening circa 1997, it was not uncommon to see the contrast in sharp relief. Well-heeled tech workers and returning emigrants sipped pints in new gastropubs, while a few blocks away, an emaciated teenager might huddle in a dark doorway, heating heroin on tinfoil (chasing the dragon) for a brief escape from a grim reality. The boom-times Ireland was a relatively poor country at the start of the decade with high unemployment and poverty,1 and although rapid growth was transforming it into one of Europe's wealthiest nations by 1999, those benefits had yet to trickle into Dublin's long-neglected quarters. The city was living a double life: optimistic and outwardly affluent on its polished surface, but haunted by a hidden epidemic of addiction and a legacy of mental health struggles that festered beyond the glow of new neon signs.
- [Rainbow Resistance: How Hungary’s LGBTQ Community Defied Orbán’s Ban](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/rainbow-resistance-how-hungarys-lgbtq-community-defied-orbans-ban/): Hungary banned Pride, but 200,000 marched anyway. Inside Orbán's anti-LGBTQ crusade and the resistance movement reshaping Hungarian democracy.
- [Vibe Writing: How Indie Authors Use AI Without Losing Their Soul](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/vibe-writing-how-indie-authors-use-ai-without-losing-their-soul/): Even novice writers are finding that, with the right prompts, an AI co-pilot can turn vague notions into richly detailed scenes. In tech circles, the phenomenon has a name: "vibe coding." Coined by former OpenAI chief Andrej Karpathy, vibe coding is essentially giving in to the creative "vibes" and letting an AI fill in the rest. Applied to fiction, "vibe writing" means guiding the tone and atmosphere with natural language or even casual conversation, rather than crafting precise, technical prompts. Merriam-Webster recently defined vibe coding as writing (or coding) by simply telling an AI what you want and letting it create the result, without needing to understand how it works. In practice, this means an indie novelist might say to her AI assistant: "Let's write this chapter as if it's a cold noir thriller, moody cityscape and all." The AI then unfurls a draft mimicking that style, leaving the human to refine and inject personal touches.
- [Sora 2 and Veo 3: How AI Video Tools Are Transforming Indie Film](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/sora-2-and-veo-3-how-ai-video-tools-are-transforming-indie-film/): In the hush after the holidays and on the cusp of Sundance season, a quiet revolution is creeping into the film world's margins. Indie directors, fresh from applying for early-year grants, find themselves armed with algorithms as much as cameras. Cutting-edge tools are slashing traditional costs: studios report roughly a 20-30% drop in production spending thanks to AI. Independent crews are taking note. At these savings, a microbudget filmmaker can stretch a $50K shoot by thousands of dollars. "A filmmaker working with a $50,000 budget who reduces costs by 25% gains $12,500 for additional creative resources."
- [Generative AI in Film: The Tools Letting Anyone Make Studio-Quality Movies](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/generative-ai-in-film-the-tools-letting-anyone-make-studio-quality-movies/): Even at a technical level, the machinery behind the magic is advancing by leaps. Brookings analysts note that generative AIs can "train on thousands of existing TV or movie scripts to produce scripts based on ideas, dialogue... and even plot developments," and do it all at "astonishing speed." In human terms, a story can now be drafted in seconds, characters sketched in paragraphs, and storyboards painted out in images. In film schools, instructors marvel that such tools "lower the cost of production so much... make everything so much faster."
- [AI Beta Readers: How Machine Intelligence is Transforming Story Development](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/ai-beta-readers-how-machine-intelligence-is-transforming-story-development/): These AI beta readers operate at machine speed. Rather than waiting weeks or months for a human reader to slowly slog through a 300-page draft, an AI can flag issues almost instantly. Some services advertise "professional-grade developmental feedback on your book at the touch of a button," enabling authors to "catch narrative issues in mere moments". One editing AI crowed that you can get a "pro-level story analysis in minutes instead of months". Google's own tools are catching up: Gemini 2.0, the latest Google model, includes a "Deep Research" mode that "uses advanced reasoning and long context capabilities to act as a research assistant, exploring complex topics and compiling reports on your behalf". And Grok, the chatbot from Elon Musk's xAI, offers a "DeepSearch" feature that scours the web (and Twitter) to generate detailed summaries in response to questions—a direct competitor to ChatGPT's research assistant mode. These agents can highlight every inconsistency in a draft in seconds rather than the days a human would need.
- [Immortal Jellyfish Genome Reveals Shocking Anti-Aging Secrets](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/immortal-jellyfish-genome-reveals-shocking-anti-aging-secrets/): Floating in oceans around the world is a creature that seems to have defeated death. Turritopsis dohrnii, a hydrozoan jellyfish barely five millimeters across, can literally rewind its life. When an adult T. dohrnii is injured, starved, or aged, it doesn't simply die. Instead, the jellyfish shrinks into a blob: it absorbs its own tentacles and loses its ability to swim. Then, over the next day or so, this blob literally becomes a juvenile polyp, starting the life cycle anew.
- [Toraja People and Sacred Buffalo: Ancient Death Rituals Still Practiced Today](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/toraja-people-and-sacred-buffalo-ancient-death-rituals-still-practiced-today/): All this has made the Toraja into something of a tourist caricature. After Dutch missionaries arrived a century ago, most villagers became Christian, but the old rites persisted. Western journalists still flock here to write about the "mysterious" dead. Toraja people today are largely Christian, but their age-old funeral practices, which predate their conversion, persist, even as secular spectacle.
- [What Really Happens During an Exorcism? The Truth Behind Demonic Entry](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/what-really-happens-during-an-exorcism-the-truth-behind-demonic-entry/): At its core, the term "demonic entry" is modern jargon for an old idea: that certain actions, sins or circumstances open a door to malevolent spirits. You won't find that phrase in theology textbooks, but in evangelical sermons and folklore the concept is ubiquitous. Charismatics often speak of "gateway sins"—anything from occult dabbling (Ouija boards, sorcery, tarot reading) to vices (drug abuse, pornography, unrepented wrongdoing). The list can be as mundane as anger or as exotic as astrological curses. Behind these tropes lies a simple logic: if a person does something reprehensible, they deserve spiritual punishment, so a demon can slip in. If they confess and repent, that door can be shut. This is, of course, a theological interpretation. Skeptics would argue that the concept just moralizes human error. One contemporary commentator wryly notes that if all our psychological problems were actually "demonic entry," there'd better be a lot more priests than psychiatrists.
- [From Sangomas to Shamans: The Colonial Myth of the “Witchdoctor”](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/from-sangomas-to-shamans-the-colonial-myth-of-the-witchdoctor/): In 2015 Tanzania made headlines by banning "witchdoctors" in a desperate bid to halt grisly attacks on people with albinism.1 Officially, the move was to combat a rise in killings driven by a gruesome belief that fetishes made from albino body parts could bestow wealth. Tanzanian officials bluntly blamed "witchdoctors" for promoting these superstitions.2 But that sensational moment merely underscores a deeper confusion: what is a witchdoctor, and who says so?
- [Google’s NotebookLM: The Game-Changing Tool for Fiction Writers](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/title/): Consider a science fiction novelist toiling on a complex series, juggling dozens of characters and story threads. After finishing a chapter, he might upload it into Google's new AI-powered tool called NotebookLM and prompt a chat with the AI about what's working and what isn't. "I have them discuss what I've written and offer a reader's perspective on it," the writer explains.4 It's akin to having an impartial beta reader on call at any hour. In an online forum he even confessed that he's reached a point where he "can't imagine workflow without these tools."5
- [Naglfar, Draugr, Revenants to Flying Dutchman: The Evolution of Undead Ship Legends Through History](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/naglfar-draugr-revenants-to-flying-dutchman-the-evolution-of-undead-ship-legends-through-history/): In the chilling legends of Norse mythology, among gods and heroes, a darker figure lurks beyond mortal ken: the draugr. Far from a mere ghost, the draugr is an undead warrior infused with malevolent power and a thirst for vengeance, greed, or glory. The Old Norse word literally means an "again-walker," a once-dead body returned to the world of the living.
- [Before Gendarmerie: The Maréchaussée and Rural Law Enforcement](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/before-gendarmerie-the-marechaussee-and-rural-law-enforcement/): Long before France had a unified national police, its kings relied on maréchaussée (literally a "marshalcy" or marshal's men) to keep order. Originating in the turbulence of the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453), the Maréchaussée began as mounted provosts and sergeants under the royal marshals, charged with maintaining discipline in the army and among armed bands.
- [Visiting Paris Catacombs: The Dark History Tourists Don’t See](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/visiting-paris-catacombs-the-dark-history-tourists-dont-see/): Even above ground, Paris has always balanced on the edge of the abyss. In 1774, the Rue d'Enfer (literally the "Road to Hell") cracked open into a thirty-meter chasm, swallowing houses and livestock. Alarmed, Louis XVI commissioned inspectors in 1777 to map and reinforce the subterranean quarries now threatening the city. Those miners discovered an immense network of tunnels: an underground city. At midnight in modern Paris, an iron grate might rise and a man's flashlight would appear. These are the cataphiles: Paris's most devoted spelunkers, who treat the city's bones as "just another Friday night out". Deep below the boulevards, they inhabit a vault known as the Empire of Death: roughly 280 kilometers of ossuary caverns winding under Paris's streets.
- [Flintlock Pistols & Stinkpots: The Surprising Reality of Pirate Combat](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/flintlock-pistols-stinkpots-the-surprising-reality-of-pirate-combat/): By the Golden Age, flintlock technology had revolutionized firearms. Flintlock pistols, introduced in the early 1600s, were the cutting edge of personal guns. Pirates favored short-barrel single-shot pistols that could be fired with one hand, providing a ranged bite amid boarding melees.10
- [Life on the Edge: 16th-Century Shetland’s Harsh and Beautiful Landscape](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/life-on-the-edge-16th-century-shetlands-harsh-and-beautiful-landscape/): So what grew on these slopes and in these dales? Agriculture in 16th-century Shetland was minimal and communal. Islanders sowed only short-season grains: spring barley and oats (the hardy local bere barley in particular). In fact, that bere barley survives today as a specialty crop in the Northern Isles, a living heirloom of medieval farming. A crofter's infield might yield only enough bere for daily porridge and oat bannocks, and a little malt for ale. Potatoes and maize lay centuries ahead. People often added peas or kale behind a stone wall, but garden plots were exceedingly small. Winter stores came from lowland hayfields and from salted or dried fish kept in stone cellars.
- [Music Neuroscience: Separating Scientific Fact from Popular Fiction](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/music-neuroscience-separating-scientific-fact-from-popular-fiction/): The upshot is that "brain circuitry that lights up" during music is not a fixed blueprint that applies universally. A child, a retiree, and a conservatory grad likely all use slightly different neural strategies for listening. Young brains have more plasticity, studies show that children or teenagers often gain skill faster and show more dramatic structural change from lessons than adults. By contrast, an older adult learning guitar might see subtler changes and rely more on pre-existing networks. Factors like when you first learned, which culture of music you grew up in, and how intensively you practiced mean that any average activation pattern is a vague statistical construct. In truth, every brain has its own musical fingerprint. The variability is so large that making blanket claims (for example, "music engages everyone's nucleus accumbens") is fragile. Students of music neuroscience must remember that one person's "music cortex" map might be another's "just auditory memory retrieval."
- [Why Does Music Trigger Memories So Powerfully? The Science Explained](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/why-does-music-trigger-memories-so-powerfully-the-science-explained/): She sits quietly in the nursing home dining hall, her eyes unfocused and her hands uncertain, until a familiar melody threads through the speakers. At the first notes of Simon & Garfunkel, the fragmented pieces of Mary's memory snap into an uncanny coherence. Minutes earlier she couldn't remember her husband's name, but now she is singing every word to The Sound of Silence effortlessly.
- [A Story In Paris: Paris Catacombs’ Unlikely Renaissance](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/a-story-in-paris-paris-catacombs-unlikely-renaissance/): Visitors planning spooky adventures search for "Paris Catacombs tickets," "guided tours," and "skip-the-line" along with searches for 19th-century inscriptions and skull-pattern motifs. In October especially, catacomb-related searches routinely spike as Paris-based Halloween events and horror-film mentions kick in.
- [Cataphiles of Paris: Exploring the 6 Million Buried Bones](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/cataphiles-of-paris-exploring-the-6-million-buried-bones/): Over the centuries these depths have had many uses. Napoleon's photographer Nadar experimented with early flashlights on its winding passages, remarking that the catacombs were "that place everyone wants to see, and no one wants to see again"8. In World War II they sheltered both Resistance fighters and German soldiers. After the war, a new breed of visitor emerged. By the late 1960s and 70s, French students and artists began venturing underground for adventure and inspiration9. They called themselves cataphiles, a term borrowed from the Greek for "lover of the catacombs." Inspired by punk's DIY spirit and French speleology (caving), these explorers systematically mapped the tunnels and created an entire subculture1011.
- [Novelist’s secret: Stop Rereading Your Drafts: Use Audio to Catch What Your Eyes Miss](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/novelists-secret-stop-rereading-your-drafts-use-audio-to-catch-what-your-eyes-miss/): Even when the eyes are too heavy to parse the page, a quiet revolution in editing is possible: turn the text into sound. Novelists and essayists know that pushing through fatigue or distraction by rereading can feel like torture. Author Suzy Vadori calls the "listening pass" — using Siri or any text-to-speech reader — her secret weapon for revisiting a stalled draft. By playing her pages through speakers while doing chores or on a commute, she regains perspective: phrasing that once looked perfect on screen suddenly sounds clunky when spoken. In Vadori's experience this isn't cheating; it's a shortcut to the fresh ears every manuscript needs.
- [The Science of Dreams: What Your Brain Does While You Sleep](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-science-of-dreams-what-your-brain-does-while-you-sleep/): For millennia, humans have peered into the twilight of sleep seeking meaning. "If you die in your sleep," a sci-fi novelist recently asked, "do you continue living in your dreams?"
- [The “Wolf Man” Condition: What Hypertrichosis Really Is](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-wolf-man-condition-what-hypertrichosis-really-is/): For centuries, the line between man and beast has been drawn at the hairline. Today "werewolf syndrome" is a media magnet, but behind the buzz is a real medical anomaly: hypertrichosis, an abnormal proliferation of hair over the body. It is vanishingly rare: fewer than a few dozen congenital cases have ever been recorded. Yet each person with it has conjured fascination and fear. Did medieval peasants see a werewolf in the mirror, or simply a quirky human? The answers lie somewhere between myth and medicine.
- [The Truth About Writer’s Block: Why Discipline Beats Inspiration Every Time](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-truth-about-writers-block-why-discipline-beats-inspiration-every-time/): Writers have long treated inspiration like a capricious muse: it arrives unpredictably, so you're advised to hunt it down wherever it hides. In truth, creativity is less magic and more discipline. The idea of a mystical "block" is largely a myth, a culturally popular conceit born in the 1940s. As neurologist Alice Flaherty notes, the very notion of writer's block is "peculiarly American in its optimism that we all have creativity just waiting to be unlocked"1. In practice, great writers and creativity researchers say, inspiration doesn't strike fully formed. It must be coaxed.
- [Shetland Island Folklore: Mythical Creatures and the Lost Language of Norn](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/shetland-island-folklore-mythical-creatures-and-the-lost-language-of-norn/): In a Shetland kitchen on a winter's night, elders still warm their hands by peat-fired hearths and whisper of trows and selkies. A fiddler once claimed to have played a tune heard on an isolated 'knowe' (a tiny fairy hillock) beneath the stars. These island tales may sound quaint, but they underlie a living language.
- [The Vampire Realities in Real Life and Science](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-vampire-realities-in-real-life-and-science/): In Hugo Lunny's unsettling mockumentary We Regret Nothing (2019), a near-whispered voice recounts a candlelit ritual in rural Langley, British Columbia. The camera pans slowly to a pale young man, face half-hidden, as he describes the liturgy of blood: a crossed ritual knife, wine goblet, and murmured chant, "We regret nothing." This young man is a member of the so-called Hammet cult, led by Edgar Hammet, a loner who convinced himself he was a real vampire. According to Lunny's synopsis, Hammet "became obsessed with the notion that humans can achieve eternal life" and recruited followers to donate "their blood and ultimately their bodies to achieve his sordid ambition". As one pamphlet for the film dryly notes: "A deranged loner convinces himself he's a real vampire, creating a cult of murderers that consume human blood". The tagline of the movie sums it up: "Vampires don't exist... Humans do".
- [The Enchantment of Foxfire Funghi (Foxfire Mushrooms)](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-enchantment-of-foxfire-funghi-foxfire-mushrooms/): At twilight in an old forest, a faint emerald glow edges out of the dark: the ghostly lantern of a mushroom. It's the centuries-old phenomenon called foxfire or fairy fire, a dim, bluish-green light emanating from the mycelial fungi feeding on rotten wood.
- [Cults and the Modern World’s Obsession with Blood and Vampires](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/cults-and-the-modern-worlds-obsession-with-blood-and-vampires/): They begin with the body. The obsession with blood, its scent, its shimmer, its promise of continuity, is the oldest superstition in the human archive. Civilizations have bled themselves for gods and for glory, and when those gods went silent, they resurrected the logic of the offering in art, in medicine, in the dark corners of subcultures that rehearse the primitive in private. In this century, the vampire has become both mirror and myth, a shape that explains our terror of mortality and our hunger for intensity in a sterilized age.
- [Every crop needs harvesting… Even the illegal ones.](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/every-crop-needs-harvesting-even-the-illegal-ones/): Long before cocaine ever darkened the headlines, the coca leaf grew as a sacred gift. In Andean myth, coca sprang miraculously from the earth—one legend has it that Kuka, a bewitching maiden, was slain and buried, and from her grave a wondrous plant emerged, its leaves "bringing strength and vigor" to the people. Archaeologists now confirm that South Americans have chewed coca for roughly 8,000 years; in Inca society it was "valued as highly as gold," used in everything from altitude remedies to sacred rites. Even in colonial times coca was regarded as a divine boon: Aymara legend tells of a cataclysm that burned all plants except coca, so that "the Indians ate the leaves to relieve their hunger" in the cold highlands. Yet centuries later this humble Andean leaf would also supply a counterfeit elixir for the modern world—cocaine—breeding fortunes, violence and political upheaval far beyond its native valleys.
- [Strangers of Santiago and Beyond](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/strangers-of-santiago-and-beyond/): On a sleepy night in Santiago, the unremarked apartment building at Calle San Isidro 332 hides a hidden drama. Inside, Kasia Pomes—a Polish immigrant in her mid-50s—quietly manages this old tenement. Unbeknownst to many, Kasia's landlord is a local crime syndicate, and her loyalty is its secret. In Hugo Lunny's screenplay The Strangers of Santiago, she's desperate to escape the life she's been trapped in, but the gang running the building will not release its valuable "manager."
- [The Bone Brokers: Inside the Global Black Market for Human Body Parts](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-bone-brokers-inside-the-global-black-market-for-human-body-parts/): Corpses are supposed to repose in peace. Yet reporters have uncovered cases where the dead have become raw material for profit. In one recent Colorado scandal, a mother-and-daughter funeral home team "stole the bodies or body parts of hundreds of victims, and then sold those remains". Families were told their loved ones were respectfully cremated—but in reality the bodies were being cut apart and sold to researchers and collectors. Such macabre schemes are not isolated. From Colonial-era grave robbers to today's funeral-home entrepreneurs, commerce in corpses has a long history. Even the novelist Hugo Lunny—author of the funeral-home thriller The Lies People Tell—was later "amazed" to learn that his fiction mirrored real life.
- [What lies beneath civil societies.](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/what-lies-beneath-civil-societies/): In a London suburb during the 2020 lockdown, an otherwise innocuous house was raided. Inside, police found eight Romanian women wearing face shields and masks, not patients, but sex workers under surveillance. A giant bottle of hand-sanitiser by the door served as grim proof of an elaborate ruse. As one anti-trafficking specialist noted: "On the surface, this did not look like a place where criminality and sexual exploitation was taking place." Only after forcing entry did officers discover a hidden network: three brothels run by a criminal gang, each raking in over £1 million a year.
- [The Mermaid’s Dark Wake – the reality behind mermaids](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-mermaids-dark-wake-the-reality-behind-mermaids/): On an April dawn in 1964 a Danish laborer discovered an unnerving scene at Copenhagen's harbor: the city's beloved 100-year-old Little Mermaid statue lay headless, her neck expertly sawed through. Tourists and Danes alike stood silent under fog-shrouded skies. The incident—a capital crime of vandalism—underscored how this most iconic mermaid carries a freight of passion and fury far beyond the Disney fairytale. In fact, mermaids in human lore are often ominous creatures. Across centuries and continents, mermaid tales mingle allure and atrocity: they bring blessings and curses, promise love and death, and straddle the line between beauty and monstrosity. As scholars note, sailors came to fear not just a mermaid's seductive voice but "her tail—her otherness, her halfness".
- [What is the South Africa Offender dialogue program? How does it work.](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/what-is-the-south-africa-offender-dialogue-program-how-does-it-work/): In Hugo Lunny's novel and screenplay The Moment Has Gone, a widower named Cy Perrottet finally gets his shot at vengeance, or maybe at healing. After losing his wife Naomi to a drunk driver named Ludvik Abijah, Cy's therapist insists he face the man one-on-one. The production synopsis explicitly describes the story as "the meeting of a widower and the man who caused him to become one". The logline reads that "two lives connected through the worst possible way try to help each other move beyond their shared experience", remarkably parallel to real restorative justice goals. Lunny's tagline, "Who does a grudge hurt more?", echoes the question these sessions put to real people.
- [The science of nightmares](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-science-of-nightmares/): It turns out "sleeping with one eye open" is more than a figure of speech. Neuroscientists have documented a first-night effect: when you crash in an unfamiliar bed, one hemisphere of your brain actually stays half-awake, as if on sentry duty. This primitive vigilance may explain why travel insomnia is real, and perhaps why dreams feel stranger in strange places. But nightmares themselves are far more than a quirk of novel surroundings. For perhaps 3-7% of people, recurrent terrifying dreams are a real and ongoing affliction. Even casual users of the word "nightmare" admit it's typically hyperbole, yet clinically, nightmares are defined as vivid REM dreams that awaken the sleeper with fear or terror. In sleep labs, people describe leaping from bed at dawn, heart hammering, gasping for breath as if a predator has been leashed from the mind's dark zoo. Those who endure them know: it can feel like a malevolent presence just off-camera in our bedroom.
- [The Underground City Beneath Paris: Inside the Cataphile Movement](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-underground-city-beneath-paris-inside-the-cataphile-movement/): Descending through a manhole on a rainy Paris night, one urban explorer says it feels "like the Upside Down from Stranger Things". What lies beneath is a hidden city: 280 kilometers of tunnels and quarries stretching under the City of Light, home to an outlaw subculture of "cataphiles" (self-styled lovers of the below) who illegally roam where the official tour does not go. This is the story of that underworld: its secret gatherings, art installations, terrifying labyrinths and strict etiquette. It is a tale of youth rebellion and creative zeal beneath a metropolis obsessed with image and control.
- [What are the origins of sleep paralysis in folklore?](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/what-are-the-origins-of-sleep-paralysis-in-folklore/): In 1664, a Dutch physician recorded the case of a petrified woman who awoke from sleep unable to move. "She believed the devil lay upon her and held her down, lying as a weight upon her breast," he wrote. Her cries went unanswered as she lay paralyzed, convinced she was under a witch's grip. Nearly four centuries later, the feeling hasn't changed; only the names and stories have. What science now calls sleep paralysis -- a temporary mix-up of REM atonia and wakefulness -- was once universally explained by demons and ghosts. Today it is estimated that roughly 30% of people worldwide experience this terror at least once. Yet in the throes of an episode, victims across the globe swear they are being pressed down by some evil presence.
- [Life At Sea on a Pirate Ship](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/life-at-sea-on-a-pirate-ship/): Pirate life was no swashbuckling adventure holiday. In fact, sometimes it barely felt alive at all. The cornerstone of the legend is the treasure, the chests of gold, the exotic loot. Yet when divers in the 1990s excavated Blackbeard's flagship Queen Anne's Revenge, the results were strikingly meager. They found "less than an ounce of gold dust, hardly a trace" of treasure. As one scholar wryly points out, everything valuable had been spirited away long before the wreck: "according to the men Blackbeard marooned, their captain absconded with all the booty and left them with nothing". Pirates prided themselves on a code of fairness, but when the mast went down, the only booty left was a souvenir wineglass commemorating King George I's coronation, a bit of mockery Blackbeard kept in his cabin as "profound symbolism".
- [How Pirate Crews Voted, Punished, and Cut Each Other Open](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/how-pirate-crews-voted-punished-and-cut-each-other-open/): Pirates of the so-called Golden Age (roughly 1650-1720) were hardly the romantic rogues of legend. At best they ran their vessels like rough-and-ready democracies. A captain's power was limited: outside battle he often "had no more power than every other pirate on board," and major decisions - destinations, prizes, even punishments - were usually voted on by the crew. Captains were typically elected by their men for good reason: a weak or unpopular skipper might be marooned or overthrown by consensus at any port. Indeed, "pirate crews also elected their captain" under a signed articles-of-agreement that spelled out rules and shares. In battle the captain took charge of navigation and combat strategy, but ashore or at sea he was more like a chairperson: one vote among many.
- [How to write a novel in the age of AI](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/how-to-write-a-novel-in-the-age-of-ai/): In early 2023 Rochester salesman Brett Schickler watched in amazement as ChatGPT (OpenAI's text-generating chatbot) spun out a fully‑illustrated 30‑page children's book in a few hours. Schickler, a novice writer, credited simple prompts ("write a story about a dad teaching his son financial literacy") for the output. His experience was far from unique: a Reuters investigation found hundreds of Kindle books listing "ChatGPT" as author or co-author. Almost overnight, aspiring authors from California to India began treating AI as muse, editor and co‑pilot. Tech titans took notice. Within weeks, Alphabet and Microsoft scrambled to infuse Google and Bing with similar AI features. It was clear: generative language models were storming the literary playground.
- [Write Dangerously and Authentically: Blueprints of Storytelling: Why Outlines and Treatments Matter](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/write-dangerously-and-authentically-blueprints-of-storytelling-why-outlines-and-treatments-matter/): In the alchemy of storytelling, the outline or treatment often functions as the writer's secret safety net. It may sound paradoxical to talk about formulas when discussing flights of fancy, but even the wildest tales typically have an unseen scaffold. Veteran writer M.D. Presley wryly notes that a screenplay's treatment "acts like the general outline for the novel" - in other words, it's the hidden architecture that frames the magic. Some authors thrive on this structure: best-seller Jeffrey Deaver insists that outlining is "the most efficient way to structure a novel to achieve the greatest emotional impact". Others greet the outline with skepticism. Stephen King famously shuns it, declaring bluntly, "I don't outline... I'm really happy if I know what's going to happen tomorrow... And that's enough". Aaron Sorkin, too, admits he's "never been a meticulous planner" - he simply lays down a first scene and then "walk in the dark with a flashlight," trusting the story to emerge as he goes. J.K. Rowling is in the opposite camp: during the fifth Harry Potter book she charted a hand‑drawn spreadsheet of prophecy, romance, Dumbledore's Army and more. As one commentator quipped about her chart, those columns "pretty much encompass the whole story". The extremes make the point: whether writing on instinct or in meticulous detail, every novel or film project is, at some level, playing out on a predetermined map.
- [Were there women pirates? Of course. The Hidden Heroines of the High Seas](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/were-there-women-pirates-of-course-the-hidden-heroines-of-the-high-seas/): Few search results for women pirates or female pirates paint a complete picture. Most point to Anne Bonny and Mary Read—the notorious ragged beauties of Calico Jack's crew—and a smattering of legendary names, real or not. "Bonnie Kidd" or "Calico Reed," for example, sound like mash-ups of Anne Bonny, Calico Jack (John Rackham), and Mary Read, but no genuine logbook or court record ever lists them. In reality, female buccaneers were rare by design—captains often refused women aboard, fearing bad luck—but a surprising number of women did serve. Some were born to piracy (like Irish chieftain Grace O'Malley), others married into it, and still others joined out of sheer necessity. The result is a half-forgotten history of women pirates that is stranger and more compelling than most legends. A close look at the records shows these women not as Hollywood tropes but as shrewd, dangerous actors—the "ghosts" in the male-dominated age of sail.
- [The Allure of Supernatural Academies in modern young adult literature](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-allure-of-supernatural-academies-in-modern-young-adult-literature/): In the world of genre fiction, "supernatural academy romance" has emerged as a popular sub-genre: think Hogwarts meets Twilight, but with its own distinct flavor. The term "academy" carries an aura of history - even Plato's original Academy (founded c. 387 BC in Athens) conjured images of an exclusive grove of learning. Today that sense of intellectual mystique has shifted from Plato to potions: fantasies in which monsters roam campus halls and adolescent students master forbidden arts. These stories tap into a deep, even nostalgic fantasy of school as both sanctuary and crucible. As one observer notes, magical schools "promise a better relationship between the reader and their own educational endeavours", flipping the real-world rigors of class and cliques into adventures where powers can be unlocked and destiny rewritten. In effect, supernatural academies offer wish-fulfillment: a setting where readers can relive schooldays through enchanted eyes.
- [What’s all this chatter about “romantasy”?](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/whats-all-this-chatter-about-romantasy/): It was approaching midnight in a New York City bookstore when Sarah J. Maas stepped onstage to celebrate her latest novel, House of Flame and Shadow. In her Valentino tweed skirt the crowd erupted into screams. It was a rockstar welcome — but then Maas's fans know her books well: Throne of Glass and A Court of Thorns and Roses have sold 37 million copies in 38 languages. Fans treat her like a pop icon because Maas and others write romantasy — a blend of sweeping fantasy and sweeping romance. In other words, their stories promise epic quests and steamy love. One industry editor coined the term "romantasy" to describe Maas's work.
- [Must writers now collaborate with AI to stay ahead?](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/must-writers-now-collaborate-with-ai-to-stay-ahead/): A stylized illustration shows ideas - glowing swirls of gold - flowing from a fountain pen onto a page. It captures the current moment in creative writing, when authors often feed words to an algorithm and watch it fill the page. In effect, a writer can prompt ChatGPT or a similar large-language model (LLM) and receive fresh text on demand. Advocates call this a way to "amplify" human creativity. Critics, however, note that machine-produced prose still lacks the soul of human art - it often falls back on pattern and cliché. In practice, the secret is learning how to talk to the machine: giving it just enough guidance and style so that it can spin out useful story ideas or vivid descriptions without losing the writer's voice.
- [DNA, Epigenetics and bloodlines ending…](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/dna-epigenetics-and-bloodlines-ending/): For more information on Untenable: Our Fragile Preservation check out the production's official page.
- [The Hasburg Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-hasburg-empire-and-the-austro-hungarian-empire/): For more information on Untenable: Our Fragile Preservation check out the production's official page.
- [What Are Nightmares Made Of?](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/what-are-nightmares-made-of/): The Nightmare (1781) by Henry Fuseli, a Romantic-era painting of a demonic creature perched on a sleeping woman's chest. In earlier centuries, a "nightmare" meant not just a bad dream but the night-mare itself, a malevolent spirit (the Old English mære or mare) that sat on the sleeper's rib cage. Samuel Johnson's 1721 dictionary even defined it as "a disease when a man in his sleep supposes he has a great weight laying upon him". Writers and artists capitalized on this idea: Fuseli's iconic painting (and a later engraving by Thomas Burke) explicitly visualize the incubus-and-hag scenario of sleep paralysis. Science now tells a more physical story, the brain weaving fear-inducing images during REM sleep, but folklore's image of a ghoul crushing the chest lives on in language and legend.
- [How is cinnabar relevant to Khaldaeons?](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/how-is-cinnabar-relevant-to-khaldaeons/): Cinnabar and its pigment vermilion have been the color of kings and of death. Literally "blood of the earth," cinnabar is mercury(II) sulfide (HgS), a mineral that paints whole veins of rock in bright red. Since Neolithic times it has been ground to vermilion, a fiery red pigment prized worldwide. As the Metropolitan Museum's Ellen Spindler notes, this ore has "been mined and used as a precious resource by many cultures...since at least the 10th millennium B.C."; indeed, in ancient texts the names cinnabar and vermilion are used interchangeably, with the former referring to the mineral and the latter to the pigment. But the beauty of vermilion hid a lethal secret: the mercury locked inside.
- [The sections of a Pirate Ship](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-sections-of-a-pirate-ship/): On the horizon, the silhouette of a three-masted brigantine cuts through the flaming orange of sunset, its rigging like a spider's web against the sky. In the Golden Age of Piracy (roughly 1690–1730), ships like these — often converted merchantmen or captured naval vessels — became the mobile lairs of buccaneers and corsairs. They were more than floating fortresses; each plank, sail and yardarm carried a history of sea lore and seafaring innovation. A vessel's hull and deck were home and battleground, its rigging a spider's trap for wind and prey. To understand "the anatomy of a pirate ship" is to decode the very language and symbolism of the sea. Pirate crews named every part of the ship with precise terms — from "aft" (rear) to "bowsprit" (the forward spar) to "fo'c's'le" (the forecastle, forward deck) — each reflecting a function and often a story. In a raucous cocktail of history and myth, this article dissects that anatomy: the hull's frame, the lofty mast and sails, the cramped quarters and deck arrangements, the weapons and the rituals that unfolded aboard these notorious ships. Along the way, we'll glimpse how reality and legend intertwine — from buried treasure sagas to nautical superstitions. All the while, the facts are footnoted with sources, so that each barnacle of lore has been empirically examined.
- [Taxidermy: The Art of Keeping the Dead Alive](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/taxidermy-the-art-of-keeping-the-dead-alive/): In a San Diego storefront workshop, women clad in casual clothes crouch over a plastic-covered table littered with dead rodents—four rats, two guinea pig carcasses, a brown rabbit—scalpels in hand. Taxidermy instructors like Simone Pixley Weinstein guide them through delicate cuts ("just slice like a banana," she advises), teaching each student to skin and preserve these animals. Such classes at Pixley's Oddities—a tattoo-and-taxidermy studio—illustrate how far the craft has strayed from its old stereotype. As one recent profile notes, taxidermy "might once have conjured up the image of a grizzled hunter mounting a deer's head," but today "the many women and increasingly diverse people" in the field are "redefining the practice". Whether in a tattoo shop in California or a college program in rural Manitoba, taxidermy is becoming surprisingly common, taught to hunters and urban hobbyists alike.
- [What is leucism?](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/what-is-leucism/): Across cultures and epochs, the sudden sight of a snow-white animal has stirred both awe and terror. White deer vanishing into misty forests, ivory-colored lions prowling the savanna, or a pallid buffalo calf among its herd—all trigger legends of divinity or doom. In recent years scientists have unpacked the genetics of leucism (a partial loss of pigment), explaining the biology behind these oddities. But for every known white lion or peacock, human stories have woven complex myths about so-called "leucistic people", sometimes as sacred inheritors of a special bloodline, sometimes as cursed or conspiratorial outcasts. The truth is more prosaic. Nevertheless, echoes of these white legends reach into modern fiction, for example Hugo Lunny's new drama Untenable: Our Fragile Preservation, in which an immortal family of pale-skinned "Khaldaeons" hides among humans. This Atlantic-style survey traces leucism from its genetic origins through folklore, real examples, and the dangerous fables it can spawn, ending with how those myths ripple into books and screenplays.
- [What Is Anhedonia and What Does It Mean to Be Anhedonic?](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/what-is-anhedonia-and-what-does-it-mean-to-be-anhedonic/): In a brightly lit Charleston living room, Susan, once a lively and devoted nurse, could barely raise her arms to pet her puppy. An avid gardener and social butterfly, she had found herself in a strange new world: indifferent and numb to everything that used to bring her joy. "She didn't really care about doing much of anything," a clinician later reported, "In the midst of her anhedonia -- the medical name for the inability to experience pleasure -- she couldn't even play with her adorable little puppy". Susan's story was hardly unique, but it crystallizes the stark experience of being anhedonic. Though depressive and melancholic states often steal cheer, anhedonia is something more specific: a kind of flatlining of the emotional spectrum that leaves life feeling drained of color or warmth.
- [The Long Haul Truckers: Life on Canada’s Highways](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-long-haul-truckers-life-on-canadas-highways/): The grind of each day leaves its mark. After weeks behind the wheel, even small setbacks—a snow squall on the 401, a full parking lot at a rest stop—feel personal. Throughout the pandemic, drivers reported extended hours and soaring fatigue: one survey of Canadian long-haul truckers found that more than 50% of drivers reported being fatigued, largely because they were forced to work longer and couldn't find places to eat or park. These complaints have only intensified in recent years. The sight of a closed fast-food drive-thru or a locked rest-area restroom on Quebec's highways can send seasoned drivers scouring for fuel stations at the last minute. Even before COVID-19, trucking researchers noted that drivers battled poor diet and sedentary schedules: long-haulers have much higher rates of diabetes, obesity, and hypertension than the general population. Such facts explain why Michel always packs oatmeal and fresh fruit in his sleeper—and why a call home from New Brunswick or upstate New York, to hear a child's laughter, can be as vital as a prescription. If the body starts to fail, the business fails: there are no union sick days out here, only deliveries on time or cancelled freight, with heavy bills still due back at the office.
- [The idea of immortals in fiction and religion.](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-idea-of-immortals-in-fiction-and-religion/): For more information on Untenable: Our Fragile Preservation check out the production's official page.
- [How residents of Tallahassee cope with and prepare for hurricanes in the modern world](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/how-residents-of-tallahassee-cope-with-and-prepare-for-hurricanes-in-the-modern-world/): As summer unfolds beneath the humid sky of Florida's capital, long-time Tallahasseans can't entirely abandon a low-grade wariness. All along Florida's 1,350 miles of coastline, the Atlantic hurricane season officially runs from June 1 to November 30, peaking in late summer. Here in Tallahassee, nearly 150 miles inland but not beyond the storm's reach, every rise in temperature and swell in the Gulf sets into motion a familiar choreography of preparation. By June's end, city officials are already hosting workshops on emergency kits and families stockpile batteries, water, plywood, and canned goods as a ritual of survival. This quiet vigilance — the whole city essentially "on watch" for months — is born of science and history. Hurricanes form like souped-up engines fueled by heat and moisture: warm ocean waters (at least 80°F deep for 50 meters) evaporate under tropical trade winds, feeding towering thunderstorms that spin into cyclones. In that broiler of the Atlantic and Gulf waters, most storms remain offshore. But a lucky path can turn them into hurricanes — colossal atmospheric machines that extract warmth and spew back destruction.
- [What were triremes?](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/what-were-triremes/): In the end, the answer to "What were triremes?" is never merely a dry definition. They were sleek, three‑decker galleys — but also the "nuclear deterrent" of the ancient world. They protected civilizations and enforced tyranny, often in the same breath. A trireme could deliver a democracy's grain fleet safely to harbor, or shatter a reluctant island into bondage. It could be reason for a city's celebration or prelude to its destruction. All that we have left is fragments of battle and faint murmurs in the sources. As one journalist-archaeologist observed, the Trireme Trust's experiments "suggest that ancient historians like Thucydides were not exaggerating about the capabilities of triremes". What's not exaggerated are the ships' legacies in ruthless strategy. The trireme was the ultimate power projection of its age — and a stark reminder that military "innovation" often carries a very dark side.
- [Life with Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS)](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/life-with-postural-orthostatic-tachycardia-syndrome-pots/): In August 2009 a 17-year-old high-school athlete—three-sport volleyball champion nicknamed "the Energizer Bunny" for her endurance—suddenly found that simply standing up sent her world spinning. The previously fit teenager began feeling dizzy and her heart race the instant she rose from her bed, forcing her to rely on an elevator key at school and to see the nurse every day. Only after months of confusion and doctors' dead ends did a specialist perform a tilt-table test and diagnose her with Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, or POTS. POTS turned out to be a cruel misnomer: instead of allowing this "Energizer Bunny" to run on, it stopped her in her tracks.
- [What exactly is “gallows humor”?](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/whats-exactly-is-gallows-humor/): Gallows humor is, in a sense, laughter's darkest triumph—humor that snickers at death and disaster. Merriam-Webster defines it plainly as "humor that makes fun of a life-threatening, disastrous, or terrifying situation". In practice it is an outlaw genre: jokes or witticisms born in the black pits of fear, delivered by those "facing a perfectly hopeless situation" who nevertheless "still manage to say something funny," as Kurt Vonnegut observed. It sits at the bleeding edge of taste, where levity collides head-on with tragedy. In literature and criticism it goes by many names—black comedy, dark humor—but gallows humor is specifically humor about the gallows, about execution and death. It differs from cruder "blue" or ribald jokes by a narrow definition: it treats mortality itself as the punchline. Even Wikipedia notes that while black humor spans many taboos, gallows humor is used "more specifically in relation to death, or situations that are reminiscent of dying". In other words, gallows jokes are not just irreverent: they are irreverent about the irreparable. It is the dissonance of cracking wise in the jaws of doom that gives gallows humor its grim subversive power.
- [The history of the “fetch”](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-history-of-the-fetch/): In an old Irish tale a doctor's wife was roused in the dead of night to see her husband's exact image standing by the window -- even as the real doctor lay asleep beside her. The visitor silently read a book; when she dared to look again, he was gone. By morning the doctor had died of a burst blood vessel in his lungs, and in grief the wife wailed, "Oh! the fetch, the fetch!". Such stories are cornerstones of the Irish fetch legend -- the fetch being a spectral twin or "wraith" of a living person. In folklore the fetch is "an exact, spectral double" of someone and is always ominous. It can only be seen by others (or sometimes only by the person himself), and is interpreted as a portent: sightings at night foretell the original's death (a fetch seen at dawn can perversely promise longevity). In short, to glimpse one's fetch is to "see a soul departing" -- a harbinger of imminent fate. (If you see your own double strolling beside you, myth says you've got reason to worry.)
- [Life in Quebec at the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/life-in-quebec-at-the-onset-of-the-covid-19-pandemic/): For more information on Missing Since January check out the production's official page.
- [The history of real mermaids and the folklore behind them](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-history-of-real-mermaids-and-the-folklore-behind-them/): In conclusion, the history of real mermaids is not a chronicle of biology but a chronicle of culture. No mermaid corpse has ever been found and no mermaid gene has ever turned up—in that sense, they were never "real" creatures. But they are unquestionably real in our collective storybook. From Hudson's logbook to Andersen's fairy tale to a modern aquarium tank show, mermaids have swum through four centuries of human thought. They have taught us to question what we see, to beware of hoaxes and to cherish imagination. In that sense, mermaids are as "real" as the myths and dreams we keep alive.
- [The real life of pirates](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-real-life-of-pirates/): For more information on The Charm of Hope check out the production's official page.
- [The Charm of Hope: Pirate terminology](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-charm-of-hope-pirate-terminology/): On the quarterdeck stood the captain, but even the title "Captain" was conditional. Pirates famously had codes of conduct called articles of agreement. These stipulated governance onboard. For instance, one code states emphatically, "Every man has a vote in affairs of moment"—meaning the crew elected and could replace their captain. No private despotism here: a quartermaster (akin to a democratically chosen "prime minister") oversaw the division of loot and arbitrated disputes. (As one captain later admitted, he could not carry out any plan without the quartermaster's assent.) Even medical care was communal: codes often promised cash from the common chest for injuries. For example, a lost right arm might be valued at 600 pieces of eight (silver coins)—funding replacement limbs or at least food while the pirate healed. In short, the anatomy of the ship—from keel to crow's nest—and its economy of loot were both tightly scripted by pirate terminology and tradition.
- [The Secret City Beneath Paris: Inside the World of the Cataphiles](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-secret-city-beneath-paris-inside-the-world-of-the-cataphiles/): In effect, the tunnels are self-styled as an unauthorized museum. The cataphiles watch over it closely: they quietly clean chambers, rebuild sculptures, and police graffiti. One observer notes a "great community spirit"—cataphiles band together to "rebuild a sculpture or remove graffiti" after defacements, while sharing food and keeping the place tidy.
- [Paris’s Greatest Eviction: The Nightly Transfer of the Holy Innocents](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/pariss-greatest-eviction-the-nightly-transfer-of-the-holy-innocents/): Paris at the end of the ancien régime was a city literally under siege by its own dead. The centuries-old Cimetière des Saints-Innocents, wedged into the heart of bustling Les Halles, had become a toxic morgue. Les Halles merchants and pallbearers shared the same cramped streets, and human decomposition mingled with "the blood and guts of the market... to form a putrid stench, a dangerous effluence" of death. Local writer Louis-Sébastien Mercier warned of "cadaverous miasmas" poisoning the air. By 1780 the overflow of corpses was urgent: one Parisian found his cellar filled with rotting bodies when the wall of a mass grave burst open. King Louis XVI's government finally declared the cemetery a health hazard and sealed it shut. But shutting the gates of Saints-Innocents only posed a new question: what to do with millions of exhumed corpses?
- [The Origins of Soul Theft](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-origins-of-soul-theft/): In the 19th century, when the first cameras were assembled and the earliest daguerreotypes began to shimmer on glass plates, something deeper than curiosity stirred in the human psyche. To the eye unaccustomed to the alchemy of light and silver, this new contraption did not merely reproduce faces but imprisoned them. In countless communities across the world, the camera became an object of awe, suspicion, and, for some, existential fear.
- [Writing Broken English with Precision and Respect](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/writing-broken-english-with-precision-and-respect/): In fiction and film, a tired trope persists: the foreign character who speaks in halting, ungrammatical English, think everyone from Kafka's castle guards to countless comic-relief sidekicks. Yet readers (and viewers) increasingly bristle: do people really talk like that, and is it fair to depict them that way? Once a handy shortcut to signal "outsider" or class, the trope of the "broken English" speaker is now questioned by writers, linguists and critics alike. Shakespeare himself playfully used the notion, King Henry V quips that he wants to hear the French Princess Katherine "confess it brokenly with English tongue" , but even in his day "broken English" meant "foreign accent," not literal grammatical errors. Today the label carries weighty baggage. A recent Cambridge study finds that calling any non-standard English "broken" tends to construct its speakers as an Other and often in a highly negative light . In short, such portrayals do more than mark difference, they can demean.
- [Beneath the City of Light: The Secret History of Paris’s Catacombs](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/beneath-the-city-of-light-the-secret-history-of-pariss-catacombs/): In the damp silence beneath Paris's 14th arrondissement, a stone warning greets the few who enter: "Arrête! C'est ici l'empire de la Mort" - "Stop! This is the Empire of Death." The grim injunction is no idle flourish. Here, in ancient limestone quarries once deep beneath the City of Light, lie the bleached bones of millions of Parisians - nobles and paupers, saints and sinners, mingling in an underground ossuary beyond imagining . By one estimate, the Catacombs hold the remains of roughly six million people, making it the world's largest necropolis . Today the site draws over half a million visitors a year , yet few pause to recall how this underworld of skulls and femurs came to be - or the social horror and civic engineering that created it. Centuries of geology and human need have converged here: flooded gypsum pits, collapsing streets, rotting cemeteries, royal edicts, revolutionary panic, and Victorian spectacle . The Catacombs are not just a tourist oddity but a chronicle in stone (and bone) of Paris's turbulent past.
- [Writing for catharsis in fiction doesn’t always work](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/writing-for-catharsis-in-fiction-doesnt-always-work/): Writers have long cherished the idea that pouring personal pain onto the page will free the soul and enthrall the reader. But in practice, writing for catharsis in fiction doesn't always work. The lone author scribbling grief or anger into a story risks delivering what feels like a private therapy session to an uninterested stranger. As novelist Roxane Gay cautioned, an author may feel better after "writing about trauma," but that doesn't guarantee the result will resonate with others. A gripping narrative demands more than emotional outpouring: it needs craft, purpose, and a connection between characters and audience. Just because a writer has lived through sorrow or angst doesn't automatically make a novel compelling. Readers want to see a story, not just a confessional.
- [Authenticity or Caricature? The Ethics of Writing Broken English](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/authenticity-or-caricature-the-ethics-of-writing-broken-english/): The idea of "broken English" has a long history, even if the term's connotations have shifted. In Shakespeare's Henry V (1599), for example, King Henry playfully teases the French princess Katherine for her imperfect English: when she says, "me understand well," he encourages her to "break thy mind to me in broken English" . Here the phrase is light-hearted, a mutual game in courtship. By contrast, by the 19th century "broken English" often served as a blunt put-down. A 1907 New York newspaper mockingly described a young Armenian newsboy as possessing "ambition, out-going personality, and broken English" - the implication being that his immigrant tongue was something to laugh at. Thus the term evolved from comic license to a pejorative label.
- [Everything You Need to Know About the Jackalope](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-jackalope/): Mixing fact, folklore and outright hoax, the Jackalope has long been America's favorite horned rabbit. In Hugo Lunny's thriller Castigation, the Jackalope even figures as an "exotic and elusive delicacy" sold in a Wyoming deli. But beyond fiction, the Jackalope occupies a special place in real-world legend. The creature is usually described as a jackrabbit with antelope horns — a portmanteau of "jackrabbit" and "antelope" — and it has generated a surprising subculture of stories, roadside statues and kitsch.
- [The Real-Life Allure of Vampirism and the Blood Ritual](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-real-life-allure-of-vampirism-and-the-blood-ritual/): True life imitates myth in unsettling ways. In recent decades, dozens of documented cases have revealed people and fringe groups literally drinking blood or enacting blood rituals — not as fantasy, but as a quest for power, energy, or eternal youth. Journalistic investigations have described murderers who drank their victims' blood, convinced they were on the brink of immortality , and cult members who cut one another, transfused blood, or even drank each other's blood in the belief it conferred strength . As a UK psychologist noted, the cult of vampirism is to do with power and dominance, using blood to give you energy and immortality . These chilling real-world stories — from the teenage "Vampire Clan" murderer Rod Ferrell in the 1990s to tech elites funding "young blood" transfusions — echo the age-old vampire mythos. But beyond sensational headlines, they also point to profound psychological, cultural, and even scientific currents: a human craving for vitality, a fascination with blood as life's essence, and perhaps a dark synergy of trauma and belief. In this investigative analysis, we chart verified cases and historical precedents of blood drinking, examine the symbolic power of blood, and explore why the vampire archetype remains so potent in culture and even science.
- [The essential jolt of the right playlist.](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-essential-jolt-of-the-right-playlist/): Imagine a writer at her desk, headphones on, eyes closed, breathing in rhythm with the music. For her, the act of pressing play is almost sacred: a ritual that signals the start of creation. The right playlist can electrify a writer's mood and focus the mind in ways that silence alone cannot. "Music sets the tone," novelist Liz Riggs explains, "it essentially puts me into a frame of mind to write; it establishes the mood, dictates the vibe." Good writing, as Virginia Woolf famously noted, is about rhythm, and many contemporary authors treat music as the soundtrack that fixes that rhythm. Toni Morrison, for example, said she wanted her novels to feel like jazz: "Jazz has no final chord... I want my books to be like that, because I want that feeling of something held in reserve." In her prose and in countless others', the right playlist provides that suspenseful, anticipatory energy.
- [The Beast of The Moors or The Wulver?](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-beast-of-the-moors-or-the-wulver/): No folklorist had encountered any living memory of a Shetland werewolf or humanoid wolf before 1930. Archival searches of old letters, parish records or oral lore produce nothing: no old ballad, no sibylline verse about a benevolent wolf-headed fisherman, no local storytellers recalling such a beast. Indeed the island's own archives bluntly describe the Wulver story's roots – "no Shetland wulver tradition older than 1930" .
- [TK and why it’s helpful when writing fiction or non-fiction in English](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/tk-and-why-its-helpful-when-writing-fiction-or-non-fiction-in-english/): In the hushed back rooms of publishing and the quiet corners of writing workshops, a curious acronym circulates. A novice writer might puzzle over it, but seasoned professionals nod knowingly when they encounter "TK." It's not a typo, nor a grating editorial criticism—it's shorthand for "to come." When authors sprinkle "TK" through a first draft, they are placing a mental bookmark at every stubborn gap: a fact to verify, a name to invent, a number to nail down. "TK" is publishing shorthand for 'to come', a signal in the manuscript that something must be added later . Because those two letters almost never appear in normal English, they stand out like beacon flares in the text .
- [What do domestic abusers look like?](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/what-do-domestic-abusers-look-like/): This article about what domestic abusers look like was created in association with the information that inspired "The Origin of Issues" film, a dark drama which centers around domestic abuse and its psychological effects.
- [Domestic Abuse, PTSD, and the Unseen Scars of Love](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/domestic-abuse-ptsd-and-the-unseen-scars-of-love/): This article about the unseen scars of love was created in association with the information that inspired "The Origin of Issues" film, a dark drama which centers around domestic abuse and its psychological effects.
- [Epigenetics: The Theory and The Proof](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/epigenetics-the-theory-and-the-proof/): Epigenetics was first coined in the 1940s by developmental biologist Conrad Waddington to describe how the "epigenetic landscape" guides cells toward different fates. Today, epigenetics refers to chemical modifications on DNA or associated proteins that regulate when and how genes are expressed, without altering the underlying genetic code. These include DNA methylation (methyl groups attached to cytosine bases), histone modifications (chemical tags on DNA-packaging proteins), and non-coding RNAs that influence chromatin structure.

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- [Broken English denim jacket (unisex)](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/broken-english-denim-jacket-unisex/): The Broken English denim jacket is a must-have for anyone aiming to make a bold fashion statement. With its 99% ring-spun combed cotton and 1% spandex fabric, it offers both durability and comfort, featuring chest pockets with buttons and a high-quality, expertly distressed finish. The vintage-inspired design and exceptional craftsmanship make it a standout piece that enhances any outfit, whether paired with a t-shirt, hoodie, or dress.
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- [Broken English Books official hat](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/broken-english-books-official-hat/): You know, and I know, in these climate changing, global warming, basically it's getting a lot hotter times that it's smart to wear both sunscreen and a Broken English hat. Not any hat, specifically one from Broken English.
- [Broken English Films Old School Bucket Hat](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/broken-english-films-old-school-bucket-hat/): Who says you have to wear a baseball cap? Not us. Here's the Broken English bucket hat so that you can seem as hipstery and laidback as you wish.
- [The Strangers of Santiago original screenplay](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-strangers-of-santiago-original-screenplay/): The Strangers of Santiago is a Broken English Films production about a building manager desperate to escape her job during a gang war as the building she manages houses one of the warring gangs.
- [Castigation original screenplay](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/castigation-original-screenplay/): Castigation is a Broken English Films production about a heavily religious man that believes we should repent for our sins in a very distinct way; offering our flesh to our fellow man. The caveat is that he doesn't encourage people to offer, he does the offering for them.
- [The Lies People Tell original screenplay](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-lies-people-tell/): The screenplay for "The Lies People Tell" details a fraudulent funeral home that provides fake ashes to the bereaved it serves and profits from the bodies they don't burn, selling them on to the black market.
- [They Sold Nightmares](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/they-sold-nightmares/): "They Sold Nightmares" is a dark tale about former friends Abdelaziz Subaghra & Donnie Krasznai, nightmare peddlers with non-complementary services.
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- [Broken English Clothing – the Hoodie](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/broken-english-clothing-the-hoodie/): Just so you're away, Broken English Hoodies are unisex. Why don't we have one for men and one for women? They're hoodies. Calm down, people. They're universal.
- [Ruptured screenplay](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/ruptured-screenplay-part-1/): An alienated barista attempts to manipulate global terrorism with the aim of crippling technology and power grids, regressing modern society.
- [The Eternal Sleep](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/the-eternal-sleep/): An eccentric neuroscientist tries to find out whether we can stay alive in our dreams if we die in our sleep.
- [The Myth of the Individual](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/myth-individual-screenplay/): "The Myth Of The Individual" chronicles Scott's adventures in deception, with trickery and headgames taken to such extremes that not even he knows what's real any more. But once a woman who loves him discovers what he's been up to, Scott's life is turned upside down: how can a liar escape a lie?
- [Off License: Pilot Episode](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/off-license-pilot-episode-screenplay/): Part of a ring of an underground organization including illegal alcohol delivery misfits, Richmond Fell, an introverted gamer has had yet another awful work-night. His unhappy and unsatisfied girlfriend Shelby is frantically doing what she can to re-ignite his interest, while exploring other options. The night never ends.
- [We Regret Nothing: The Hammet Cult speak](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/regret-nothing-hammet-cult-speak/): Influenced by tales of vampires and that fantasy world, a self-isolated boy whose parents over indulged him became obsessed with the notion that humans can achieve eternal life. He believed that he truly was a vampire and could lead a group of followers to that goal.
- [Nous Ne Regrettons Rien](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/nous-ne-regrettons-rien/): « Influencé par les histoires de vampires et par ce monde fantastique, un garçon solitaire et isolé avec qui les parents ont été trop laxistes devient obsédé par l’idée que les humains peuvent atteindre la vie éternelle. Il croyait réellement être un vampire et qu’il pouvait mené tout un groupe de personnes à ce but.
- [Rationale screenplay](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/rationale-screenplay/): "Rationale" tells the story of Richard Eaton, a middle aged professor with a poor marriage and little more in his life. One night, his wife drinks too much and cheats on him, crushing his minute world. Richard tries to commit suicide to get away from the pain, but finds that hiring a hitman may prove easier than managing it himself. This is the original screenplay modified into a play format for easy reading on the kindle.
- [The Best Laid Plans screenplay](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/best-laid-plans-screenplay/): Set in Richmond, British Columbia, "The Best Laid Plans" tells the story of J.R. and Karen, victims of yet another break in. However, this time they've managed to apprehend the culprits and calling the police isn't even up for consideration.
- [No Reprieve](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/no-reprieve-screenplay/): Behnaz Aslanyan headed to the airport to pick up her husband, unbeknownst to her, several men were waiting to abduct her and her son. Their aim, use her kidnapped son as bait to force her into selling herself for their syndicate’s gain.
- [The Murder of Isaac Thompson](https://brokenenglishbooks.com/murder-isaac-thompson/): Set in the late 1800s, The Murder of Isaac Thompson is an original screenplay that revolves around a daughter's desire to avenge her parents' untimely murders.