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I always knew I was ... unattractive. Say the word, my girl, say the word. Ugly. I thought I'd accepted it, almost relished it. It protected me from so much folly; allowed me to have so many friend...
You have two options to deal with the situation, which will be on the mind of readers. One is to blatantly ignore it. This is the post-feministic way: Treat the boy and the girl as human beings, r...
The bast way to deal with this issue is to explicitly acknowledge it, show that it isn't an issue, and move on. A superb example of this is found in the Dr. Who story, Partners in Crime. The Docto...
Several comments have made reference to the squick factor associated with sibling incest. Certainly that would be an accepted reason why your two main characters would not have any interest in one...
Many same-sex friendships are two of a similar "type" who are also competitors. When gendered male, the rivalry might be athletic or conspicuous displays of wealth. Gendered female the competition ...
As yet another male with a female best friend, this happens frequently (I think I'm more often than not better friends with women than with men.). And I can say that there are some people who will...
The biggest question is "was it work for hire" (in which case it's the same as writing a memo at work -- the workplace/publisher owns it), or another deal? This may be something only that publishe...
In your name. You hold the copyright to everything you create (with the exception of work for hire, as April points out) unless you expressly sell or transfer the copyright to another party or pla...
How can I determine the goal of a scene/chapter when the main character is entirely passive? This hugely depends on what kind of a book you're writing: genre, audience, message. And the kind o...
From the information you have given above it is completely understandable to have a character like that in the first scene. Passiveness can be state of mind given a period of time. Now as you menti...
There's nothing wrong with writing a foreword to a book; ones written by the translator are sometimes called something like "Translator's Foreword" or "About this Translation", etc. Whether you s...
I think the best way to get started as a writer is to develop a portfolio of professional work. You can start by doing jobs for free or on sites like hire writers. I wrote an article about how to...
It is tough to get published in a magazine or journal, but if you want to be a professional writer, I think that's the route to go. Most writing contests are not terribly high visibility, and quit...
Financial concerns aside, the differences in the day to day job of writing include: Structure: In a screenplay structure is everything. You have two hours to tell the story. Your forebearers have...
Grammarly is simply wrong. "Dragon" here appears to be used as an ordinary noun. There is no reason to capitalize it. The only reason to capitalize "dragon" would be if it was a proper name or part...
How do your users read and use the manual? If they use it as a textbook, where 95% of the readers start at the beginning and progress through to the end in linear fashion, then put all the new inf...
It depends, but probably you want the distributed approach where the chapter on X tells you everything you need to know about X, even if some of that is only relevant if you're using feature Y. Ho...
Can an overdone theme still work? Absolutely You have the right idea. You generally want to stay away from overdone themes, because they are, well, overdone. But if you do write a novel wit...
Some authors have their vampires looking beautiful like in Twilight, or their true form is gruesome like Angel in Buffy. (Vampires are commonly said to be lustful creatures, so making them more mon...
Part of why we read fiction is to learn something by going through an experience with the character --that's what makes identifying with the character important. For someone to lose what they and o...
I'll refrain from standard cautions about the advisability of prologues vs. weaving the back story into the main story and assume that you've definitely decided a prologue is the way to go. With th...
Please note I am describing American English punctuation convention, where the quotes go outside the final punctuation mark. I am aware that British English punctuation is handlded differently. Th...
While a story does not need to be consistent with reality, it should have the same consistency with itself as reality has. "Inner consistency" simply refers to being consistent within itself. "Of r...
If you are planning on moving linearly through 2 points on the timeline, I'd call it "parallel plotting" or similar. But I don't recall anyone in grad school officially naming this kind of approach.
"In Media Res" (literally "In the Middle of Things) would be a term used for any story that starts at some point in the plot that is not "ab ovo" (Trans: The beginning, Lit: From the Egg) and requ...
