Description: This week, we’re talking villains: the delicious ones, the flat ones, and the ones you love to ruin your main characters' lives with.

We get into what separates a villain from an antagonist, why your best bad guys need motives beyond “mwahaha” and twirly mustaches, and how to make them compelling. We also talk about why the most interesting villains are usually just your protagonist flipped inside-out (gross). We also unpack their own resident monsters, and why sometimes the real villain is, as ever, capitalism.

In Hot Goss: the deeply suspect Manning Literary Agency, its eerily static TikTok “agent,” and the increasingly plausible theory that Nigel Carlisle is involved in a water-wasting, energy-sucking, environmentally-unfriendly AI-powered romance. We have questions. Rude questions.

Welcome to Bad Lit Friends. We’re glad you’re here, even if none of us know what we’re doing.

Bad Lit Friends was created and is hosted by Meagan Thompson-Mann and Kirk Rafferty.

Show email: ⁠⁠⁠badlitfriends@gmail.com⁠⁠⁠

Bluesky: ⁠⁠⁠@badlitfriends.bsky.social⁠⁠⁠

Threads: ⁠⁠⁠@badlitfriends⁠⁠⁠

Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠@badlitfriends⁠⁠⁠

YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BadLitFriends⁠⁠⁠

Website: ⁠⁠⁠badlitfriends.com⁠⁠

Show notes:

Meagan has a $20 off coupon code for Dabble to share! Check show notes. https://app.dabblewriter.com?referralCode=8XMRGP2P

The Manning Literary Agency: Google it, we can't bring ourselves to actually link it.

The Hamspsterdance song: https://youtu.be/6WpMlwVwydo

The Pikes Peak Writers: https://pikespeakwriters.org/

Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Colorado Gold Conference: https://www.rmfw.org/conference_homepage.php

BLF After Dark: https://badlitfriends.com