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Unfinished Novel: Currently untitled. Genre: Space opera, military science fiction. Word Count: 5,532 Status: This is my third or fourth attempt at writing this monster, hindered due to an overambitious plot. I think I've nailed it now though. I'm pumping out about 2,000 per week, and editing...

Thank you for the critique, ctg. I appreciate your thoughts on it. I'll just address a few of your points. I'll address 1 and 5 together. You're right that the end of the paragraph seems like it should come immediately after the opening line. I guess I was in a bit of a hurry to introduce...

You know, I used to, but now I find I can only really do it if I have music on quite quietly, or not at all. It might be partially because I keep my playlist on random, and sometimes skip tracks I'm not in the mood for, or which are too embarassing for my housemates to hear. It distracts me from...

Altogether, it's about 3000-4500 words (projected). It introduces almost the entire cast of characters. It sets up most of the circumstances that drive those characters, and those that result in the main character being involved in the first place. It establishes the primary current events that...

Hello all. I've been out of the sci-fi/fantasy game for ages now, but I've recently re-returned to my space opera novel. I've tightened up the plot, changed the cast, improved the setting... I think I'm on to something I can finish and start sending out. Here's the start of a series of...

Well, it's artfully written. From a technical standpoint I give you thumbs up. Stylistically I find it very easy to engage with and remain focused on. In terms of actual content though ... well, it depends on what you're trying to achieve. It sounds like pure cliché heroic fantasy. If you're...

I often start with characters and/or scenes in isolation. Sometimes they're really good ones, and I write parts as though they should fit into longer works, and then find I have nowhere to go. Developing them into novel-length pieces is a nightmarish process. My current work has gone through...

Hi all. I feel a bit silly asking for help on such a specific and seemingly trivial matter, but it would be nice to have some outside thoughts. In my sci-fi story, the military of Earth supports numerous militant cults, ranging in divergance from the normal military anywhere from merely being...

There are no original ideas, only original ways of expressing them. You should probably focus more on ensuring that your plot, characterisation and so on is original and entertaining than trying to make every detail entirely alien and unexpected.

Wow, these tutorials are great, Jez. Best cartography tutorials I've seen in ages. I had a bit of a play around, using your original alpha for testing purposes. Hope you don't mind. I parchmented mine up a little.

Holy cartography, Batman! Time to have some fun with photoshop...

I think original languages fulfil all sorts of roles in a work of fiction. They add depth, they highlight a change of culture, they allow some characters to talk while others are unaware of their meaning, and of course they allow a rather more believable naming system than just hitting the...

I think it's because it's all swaggering manliness. Which is fine, except that too much of it would become tiresome. It's very clear that there's a lot of testosterone floating around here, as one would expect of heroic fantasy characters, but the concern is that this attitude of the characters...

I thought it was probably time for me to post some of my work here. I kept meaning too, but I was always waiting to comment on someone else's work first. Sadly by the time I get to a thread everything I have to say's already been said, so I decided not to worry about it. :P Here's a piece I...

I have to say I quite like what you've done here. It's a bit different, which is always good, and the language is very well chosen. However, it does feel awfully heavy and I'm not sure if I could read something like that through very long passages.

Apart from the poetic phrases, the kind of English Shakespeare wrote in, Early Modern English, is not actually particularly hard to grasp the fundamentals of. However, I will say that if you don't fully understand the language, don't use it! It's so utterly infuriating to see people use...

Three lose themselves by doing what's right... ...inspace! You know, this is how newspaper headline writers must feel ALL the time...

Thanks for all the replies, folks. I've been trying to find a moment to respond here for a bit now. You've given me a fair bit to think about. Really, every suggestion here is entirely valid (except the one where the character Gail gets knocked up -- dude, they're almost related!), but each is...

More often than not, my best characters just occur to me, independant of whatever I'm writing. Sometimes this works out quite well; I'll be typing along and suddenly, "she looked across to John, a brown haired boy who smelled faintly of cheddar--" and John will suddenly become crucial! to the...

Hi, gang. I started the setting of my novel as a worldbuilding project many, many years ago. Over the years many aspects of it have stabalised, and I'm now finding it very restrictive. As I've matured, I've thrown out ideas that were based on being "omg so cool!" or blatantly borrowed from...