Recent content by skip.knox

Most stories start with an idea, right? An idea for a character, a world, a plot, but pretty much nobody thinks up all that in one initial thought. That can work for a short story, but not for novels. So, if you grant that, then it's easy to see that it's a process, getting from Idea to The...

The phrase makes me think of a rather old version of Windows. Macintoshes don't blue screen. Linux doesn't blue screen. The reference is so specific and definitely dated. Moreover, it works only by analogy, since humans are not computers. So you are depending on the reader understanding a...

Yes, that was a misunderstanding. Feel free to discuss; folks will let you know if there's anything amiss.

I don't see an invitation to discuss, nor do I see a question. But the statements as they stand seem fine. If you want to solicit feedback, that probably belongs in World Building, as it's not in relation to an actual story in progress. I'm curious, though, to know what you saw as possibly...

But if you're looking for a swap on a full, completed novel, you'd do better to ask for beta readers. Critiques are more for scenes or a chapter or two. There are no strict rules regarding this, but trying to upload 80,000 words (number picked at random) is going to get pretty cumbersome.

>is it ok to discuss fictional religions in the context of my writing. Impossible to say without knowing more. Why do you want to discuss fictional religions? Do you mean the ones you have invented or are you looking at religions from other books? By "discuss" do you mean "here's the backstory...

It has helped me to think of revision as consisting of separate but related tasks. Improvement is one, but even that can be broken down. There's improvement of the prose--usually at the level of a phrase or sentence, or a bit of narrative or description. A setting can be improved. A character...

Also, any world older than the parameters of the story can be any age at all. It simply won't matter because no one will ever see it or know about it. I can say this magic relic comes from a hundred years before the current story, or a thousand years, or a million years. They're just numbers. I...

>I really don't think we can lay claim to any hard and fast rules to language No boxing of ears on this. It's too easy to correct. All you have to do is remove the phrase "any hard and fast", and you have nonsense; to wit, "I really don't think we can lay claim to rules to language." Of course...

I've never seen a tilde used in that way. Had I seen it, I would probably assume it was a missed keystroke. An ellipsis for a pause is also not right, and not needed. Here as elsewhere, I take the urge to use (or misuse) as a challenge. What am I trying to do here? I'm trying to indicate a...

I agree with pmmg here. This is author background, not reader background. Tell me a story, please.

Purchased. It's gotta get in line, but it says it knows a guy up towards the front, so maybe ....

As long as you are speaking of your story in the future tense, there is no practical way to answer this question. With nothing written, there's nothing to say. All things are possible. Only one works. That one way is revealed only once the story is written. Have fun!

There are numerous grammar guides that will say when to use an exclamation mark. None of them will recommend using multiple punctuation marks together. I don't want to give the impression that exclamation marks ought never be used. They ought to be used to end a sentence (never in the...

Yes, exactly, onegury. So an explanation isn't really needed, any more than one needs to explain the ecological balance of a world with dragons and dire wolves. We just take it as given. I didn't really mean it as a criticism. It was more a reaction to posing the background story as a response...