Search results

I'm one of those that "hate" fantasy names. I'm somewhat malicious about it, though. Every time I see some fantasy name with 3 Q's, a Z, and five apostrophes it just makes me think of the author as derivative. Sometimes it seems that every fantasy novel has elves, every fantasy novel has...

I've got to go with Brian on this. If your story rides on a twist near the end, your story isn't good enough. Go back and give us a story that will completely engross us even if you never add the twist. That being said, as far as foreshadowing goes I'm of the opinion that it's better to err...

Who says you have to hide anything, or even do the research? This is your story, and you aren't exactly dealing with hard facts. Make stuff up. Maybe your paranormal investigators are the real deal and they disdain all the other guys who go around with cameras and recordings and spooky...

Generally, formulaic paragraphs are for academic writing. And even there, they can be tiresome. I teach in my university's writing center, where we helps students develop their papers and their writing, and we're constantly having to work to help students unlearn the rigid formulaic systems...

I just preordered a Surface Pro 2, which launches in late October. I'll let you guys know how it goes. I'm particularly interested in the quality of the handwriting recognition, since I have worse penmanship than a thumbless monkey.

You need to parse out the structure of your plot: Inciting incident, escalation/failure, midpoint shakeup, tide-change, climax, resolution. These are what you need to hit in your synopsis, and it can all be easily placed on a single page.

How does taking notes with the pen feel? Accurate enough?

Microsoft is announcing the Surface Pro 2 in a couple of days. I'm seriously looking at that as tablet/PC/laptop amalgamation.

Are we talking guns as in only pistols and rifles? Because I could see an army putting some serious hurt on a pack of wand-waving wussies with some big artillery pieces.

Here's my Wordle: http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/6976883/MM_Wordle I guess that makes my MC's name pretty obvious. I'm not sure about any of my weird phrasings, though I tend to write with a bit of a formal structure. I suppose the only one I can pick out from the wordle is the use of...

Why doesn't John want to leave? Problems letting go? Have your MC go to a Catholic confessional, only have John come forward and do the confessing. Maybe your MC and John could even argue with each other during the confession, with your MC trying to prompt John to let go and get the hell out...

Generally speaking, protestants don't even believe in things like "holy water" and "relics." Protestantism was a move away from all that. The whole point was to move away from the rules and trappings of man and return to what the Bible actually said. Our Baptismal is just filled with regular...

As someone from the American Midwest who attends a Baptist church, if you walked in and asked for the vicar most people wouldn't even know what you were talking about. Here we would call the person a pastor, minister (for the older folks), or preacher (the most modern term). As for rules and...

Apparently the Microsoft Surface Pro has really good handwriting recognition software, and it comes with a really good Wacom digitizer pen. You can just write like you would normally write in a notebook and the surface will convert it to digital type. Here's a video example: Surface Pro...

"Please, just a moment. Just give me a moment alone. That's all I need." It's my main character begging a hallucination of his dead son to look away for a few seconds so he can finally blow his brains out.

The moon (unusually large for a planet of Earth's size, fortunately) also stabilizes the wobble of Earth's tilt, keeping us from having extremely cold winters and extremely hot summers. Essentially, without the moon, earth would be uninhabitable.

If you want to keep it from seeming too Deus Ex Machina, have your characters hang a lantern on it. Have them plan carefully, discussing beforehand that "x" could go wrong. There's a small chance of x occurring, but it's there. Nonetheless, the alternative courses of action are undesirable...

I have one, but you're going to have to buy me dinner before you get access to it.

From the way you've described your novel, I'm not so sure that you really even have a story at all. It seems like you're writing a book that shows the daily struggles of life in the world you've created. That's not a story, that's just a setting. For a story you need a specific struggle...

It's not the fact that we're afraid of giving our opinions on the pieces, it's that we literally can't slap up 1500 words of some author's published work on a public website without legal ramifications.