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  1. FionaW

    How many new characters should I introduce at a time?

    This is a topic close to my heart. My WIP/magnum opus has multiple POV characters. I settled on two protagonists, but there are several others who have significant plotlines. I gave six chapters for protagonist 1/plotline 1. Then the same for protagonist 2/plotline 2. Then I moved back to P1...
  2. FionaW

    Marketing your ebook

    Is moderately challenging, especially for those of us who really don't have enough to say to keep a blog going. So I'm putting together a website, and would welcome suggestions for the sort of things readers might want to see. The things I have come up with so far: Character pages, each with...
  3. FionaW

    Help! Publishing a Kindle

    i didn't justify my text - the amazon software did that bit for me. I had some hiccups with the formatting which I simply couldn't fix, despite going into the code (my coding skills are as follows: 'that bit of code did that, so I'll copy and paste it and maybe it will do the same over here'. My...
  4. FionaW

    Long synopses - any examples/advice please

    My take is that once you're up to that length, chapter breakdown is probably the way to go, although there does seem to be more common sense and less rigidity in submissions for genre work; as long as what you submit makes the plot clear and comprehensible, I don't think it will be chucked for...
  5. FionaW

    Help! Publishing a Kindle

    I've just published to kindle; It was a lot less painful than I expected, just time consuming. First, there is an excellent forum you can get to from the dtp site, and I suggest you cross post questions there, as you'll have a much bigger pool of kindle knowledge. There's also some great...
  6. FionaW

    Can anyone recommend books for my kindle?

    Epic fantasy, character driven SFF. I'll try most things except thinly-disguised religious tracts, teen angst, cardboard female characters and anything where erotica takes the place of an actual plot. Not keen on 'let's start with a battle because that's exciting and it always hooks the reader'...
  7. FionaW

    Can anyone recommend books for my kindle?

    Um - I'm looking for stuff that I pay for, you know, the traditional 'author spends a year of their life writing book and readers pay to read it' kind of thing. Most of us prefer to be paid for the work we do. Most of us grasp that if someone's work is constantly distributed for free, against...
  8. FionaW

    Can anyone recommend books for my kindle?

    Not the big names; they're pretty easy to find. I had hope that the ebook market would enable me to find some new writers, perhaps self-publishing on amazon. However, with the rate of (probably deliberate) mistagging*, it's really hard to search for interesting stuff. I turn up a lot of...
  9. FionaW

    Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Semi-Realism Prosthetics

    Goldhawk - the case reported in that article was a scam, and was thoroughly debunked by numerous science/medical bloggers at the time.
  10. FionaW

    The stairs...

    Whew! (wanders in, blinking, some two months and 110,000 words later) The old place hasn't changed much... Anyway, I should be making a bit more critiquing effort, so I'll throw my hat in the ring. I've picked up your last edited version (I hope). My general impression is that you are...
  11. FionaW

    Synopses...

    This is a great site I found yesterday, masses of detailed stuff, synopses included: Author! Author!
  12. FionaW

    Guy names

    I've got EBON - the book of names. It generates some weird stuff sometimes, but often I just use a couple of syllables rather than the whole name. ebon.pyorre.net
  13. FionaW

    This is fun!

    Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds Put in a section of your text, and generate a word cloud from the frequency of nouns, verbs etc.
  14. FionaW

    Synopses...

    Ask someone to read your manuscript and tell you what it's about. That often helps you focus on the important bits. Out of interest, who is telling you that there are problems with your synopsis? A synopsis really doesn't have to be all that exciting; as Miss Snark says, it's just used by an...
  15. FionaW

    Out Of The Dark

    Hang on, it is on earth...now I'm confused. I thought it was a spaceship, it is a spaceship...it's an earth based control, looking out to space...perhaps you'd better just ignore me. I still like the setup, though. Apologies for idiocy.
  16. FionaW

    Out Of The Dark

    Loved this - took me a moment to realise it wasn't on earth, though. There were a few minor punctuation issues, but I wouldn't want to deprive Chris, who no doubt will be along shortly. My only caveat here is that this is a fairly old trope, which means that whatever's wrong with that ship...
  17. FionaW

    Anyone else use a dictaphone to write?

    If you're really clever you can add punctuation as you go; you just say 'comma', 'full stop' 'begin quotes' 'close quotes' 'em dash' and so on. TBH, other than full stops and commas I don't punctuate much as I go along, as I find it spoils the flow. But I'm such a crap typist that it is still...
  18. FionaW

    Anyone else use a dictaphone to write?

    Though it felt very poncy at first, dictating into a machine. I can't do it if anyone can hear me. I've got the Dragon dictaphone/transcription software combo; it records as MP3 and then I just plug it into my laptop and the software does the rest. It's not perfect, but having just used it to...
  19. FionaW

    What about a plague in a SF/F world?

    one of the things we discussed at work once was what would have happened if HIV could be spread by sneezing. We're pretty fortunate that many of the most serious/difficult to treat infectious diseases are (relatively) hard to spread. If you want a fictional plague, I'd take an infection that...
  20. FionaW

    Manuscript format question

    Just a quick one: say that in your story you have a point where you jump ahead X years. In order not to confuse the reader you start the story with 'March 27th 1965'. Some chapters later you need to tell them it's 'December 4th 1975'. In the finished book you would (with luck) have a blank page...
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