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I'd like to make an amendment to the above. It's entirely possible to have a unique, overly-described character who isn't a Mary Sue, and a character with little to no description who is. There's n...
There is no standard definition. And not just for historical fantasy. Give me a definition, and I will show you a best selling book that doesn't follow it. If your book has both historical and fan...
I can think of a few ways: 1) Cheat. This was how Tolkien did it, so you'd be in good company. He just listed somewhere in the appendices that "Year 5798 by Gondor's calendar = 144 Shire Reckoning...
Focus on your storytelling and how you structure your narrative. This will bring clarity to the timeline more than the syntax of the calendar you end up choosing. Recall your favorite science ficti...
If you only want to convert a handful of pages into PDF, then you can do that in Microsoft Word and you will probably be ok. If you want to convert a large quantity of webpages into PDFs and wish ...
As a user of both programs, I would definitely say just put in a placeholder and let your designer import the images. Having them in the Scrivener text isn't going to help. You export them as Word ...
Design would include things like "order the data by date" or "track each author independently". Implementation would be things like an actual database schema or a routine itself. The key differen...
I'm answering this myself as well, because after mulling it over for a week I've come up with some thoughts not yet mentioned, and I'd like to flush this topic out. Who knows-- it might be helpful....
It is hard to describe great pain if you've never felt it yourself. It is better to write scenes like this in an omniscient POV, because you can focus both on the feeling itself and on what is hap...
There are different schools of thought on how masterful and complete a writer's knowledge/research should be, and I think they often correlate to how seriously you want your work to be taken. Are y...
There are many ways to research a location and a time: Books, the internet, even satellite photos and Google Street View. (Not really relevant for this project, but I've fixed some pretty basic err...
I think for a writing competition, you need a theme or focus, and maybe - for that age - some guidelines. Are you after an imaginative story, or a factual-type report of a fictional situation, or i...
A good metaphor will parallel or easily invoke the idea you're trying to convey, without extraneous or irrelevant details. It resonates with the audience and may add to the core idea. A poor metap...
I would have to agree with Lauren Ipsum's answer. Why? Because it is more character based. We experience a story through its characters. Or put another way, we connect emotionally to a story thro...
This exact problem is what makes "pure" science fiction so hard to write properly -- but also so satisfying to read when done well. I don't have a perfect answer, just some thoughts about some stor...
I have a somewhat unconventional style so I don't know how much use this will be to you. Most of my dialogue is intended to convey meaning in some form or another, or to illustrate something about ...
I'm afraid I've never seen any statistics on this. As the comments have noted, this is a very difficult estimate to make - there are many different definitions of "getting published" (does self-pub...
You can certainly get pretty far by using an online critique group. There are two problems you'll find with such a service: It's hard to get people who can commit to reading a whole book. The qua...
You can try it in a different way... All I've read about big-company publishing says that you shouldn't send your manuscript to different publishing-houses at the same time but rather send it to t...
This is called a "simultaneous submission," and a well-organized contest should have a clear-cut rule on whether or not they're allowed. If a particular contest doesn't call simultaneous submissio...
Does the OneLook Reverse Dictionary work for this? You still need to winnow down your search phrase, but it might work. (Information from this answer.) However, good ol' Google will sometimes do t...
This site is fantastic, and I think it'll give you the answers you are looking for. http://www.caroclarke.com/transitions.html
Firstly, while I like HP, I am not sure they are the best style guide for a writer. They are not all especially well written. The stories and concepts behind them are superb, which is what captured...
What you are talking about isn't "voice", but a scene change. If something is important to your to your scene, you need to describe it in detail. This is especially true in scenes with danger or s...
The paragraph starting "Recently" is where you go vegetarian. You set up your pitch in the first three paras, state your premise in the fourth, play a little devil's advocate in the fifth... and th...
