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Drama or comedy? In comedy, a neat little package of laughter and good times can be presented as the ending. Drama is so easy. Most important stories in real life involve at least a modicum of sadness. Even in children's stories, such as The Hobbit or Peter Pan, there is a loss incurred--the...

Re: Terry Pratchett: The Richard Dimbleby Lecture on Alzheimer's and assisted suicide This all hits quite close to home for me. Both of my parents had long been believers in the so-called Right to Die -- mostly because they had watched three out of four of their own immediate parents go through...

Prophecy is a marvelous device, providing the author understands its use. In our real lives we are confronted with minor prophets daily: They exist in news shows, in advertisements and in conversations with everyone from hairdressers to TV repairmen. And in our real lives we choose whether or...

Generally I will attempt to match my vocabulary and style to: * The character in whose voice, or inner voice, the story is being told. * My audience. During the years I was active in business, I found myself matching the vernacular of my individual clients, more in speech than in writing. My...

All three choices are good. Just remember the tension: Ramp it up, up, up.

The first thing I believe I'd do (if I were in your shoes) is read The Sibyl by Par Lagerkvist. Surprise: It's about a Sibyl: the oracle at Delphi, to be precise. From it, you might get a feel for what kind of religious ceremonies 'Our Lady' might be involved in. As with jailbreaks of any kind...

Almost every suggestion in this thread is a good one -- the common idea being that the author must be truly creative. Ray guns, back in the Buck Rogers days, were original; by Star Trek's time, they needed to be renamed. Today they'd simply be boring. Old concepts, though, can be repackaged...

Ninety-nine percent of the authors bringing out "Self help" books. This is especially true of those writing about how the bounteous universe will take care of them. I don't know about you, but I do not want to pay $25 for a book just so I can be someone's bounteous universe.

The newspaper columnist James Kilpatrick, in a piece written some years ago, made a very good case for the combining of words. English, he noted, has a tradition of moving in the direction of togetherness. For example: Yester day became yester-day became yesterday. When in doubt, then, one can...

One of my close friends uses the in-flight method: He strings a cord across the room, just above head height. Scene cards listing the characters and actions can then be moved forward or back with clips. My wife uses the wall-chart method. For myself, I favor chronological writing, so the...

Dale in the The Hobbit. Where else could you scuba dive among dragon bones?

Re: Dialect – the "L-F" dialect. And then there's the unfortunate genetic affliction that has made life hell for so many. I speak, of course, of the still-surviving use of the "L-F" dialect, wherein the speaker divides an interior vowel and inserts the sounds of the letters "L" and "F."...

Try attaching a toothbrush to the windshield wipers. Then, on rainy days, let the wife travel on the hood of the car while polishing her pearly whites with each swoosh of the wipers. We've found that air resistance (drag) is mitigated if she wears an Olympic quality slick fabric ski suit. We're...

It's my first Gaiman book. At 200 pages in, I'm almost embarrassed to say that this crazy world of his seems absolutely logical to me. My only other Gaiman exposure (that I'm aware of) is the film MirrorMask. A masterpiece.

The Hobbit: When Bilbo makes it back to the Shire and retrieves the barrow treasure, he finds that all of the treasure's value (which was to have been his pension) was backed by subprime mortgages. Off he goes on a new quest: this time to the land Tubigtu-Faile, where he sneaks down a tunnel...

The old Whiskey Priest in Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory.

Hey Precise Calibre -- Good start, but there's more you can do. I'll use the opening of the first paragraph as an attempt to illustrate what has been said about it being somewhat distancing. The meal was exquisite. This sentence is a throwaway because it's contained in what follows. Your real...

Last night brought a flight dream. There were platforms throughout the sky, and it was quite easy to sail from each one to the next.

Fortunately we live in a flambouyant time. Fifteen minutes at a street corner or shopping center (perhaps armed with a digital camera) should go a long way toward finding a look. And don't stop with a look. Sometimes the fragrance or the sound is even more meaningful. No one wanting to do a...

Coming of age tale on fantasy river journey.