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I'm also writing middle grade fiction and dealing with the same issue. I have decided to go with your option #3: use a milder alternative. Though in a different way from how you've laid it out. ...
Sometimes editing to fit a requirement makes you a stronger writer. And sometimes the onerousness of the requirement means you're in the wrong genre. If you said you have a 750 word limit and som...
Maybe one way to think about it is like thinking about your resume & cover letter: you are a vastly more complex person than what can fit on a few pieces of paper, but you re-arrange the order...
I looked up Isekai on Wikipedia, and one paragraph grabbed me: Several later examples from English literature include the novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), as well as A Connecticu...
In general, if you are going to be using magic or any non-scientific element, you need to introduce that very early in the first half of the first act, probably in the first pages of your story. T...
I would hide the basement but not the locked door. A coded padlock on a door inside a house is really weird, and the sort of thing someone would notice and probably comment on. If the MC has a gu...
Did you take screenshots of it being down? Does the site have an errors log? Is there a site you checked those days to make sure it wasn't just you? (https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/ and https://d...
Just redefining a word from everyday usage is rarely good. People will always first associate it with their real-life usage. Maybe switch around a few letters to make it a new "fantasy" word. Abo...
I'm not sure what a travel story is supposed to mean. A story has a problem for the MCs to solve, an answer to find, something to discover. Most of my stories involve travel and discovering new th...
It seems that you want to want to say the simple fact, but afraid that people will be sensitive for that. In that case, you can allude to the skin color by mentioning their origin first. So if it d...
A few points, in no particular order: "A black man" paints a very different picture from "an elderly black gentleman" or "a tall, black-skinned young man". In the first case, the skin colour is t...
Where I live, belonging to two-three ethnic groups is the norm. Children in school boast about being a quarter Iraqi, a quarter Moroccan, a quarter Polac and a quarter old Jerusalemi. How does one...
You have been misinformed: The Lord of the Rings doesn't have short poems at the start of each chapter. The Lord of the Rings has poems of various length (up to several pages long), when characters...
There are answers before mine; so I will only add that one other use of a poem or rhyming verse (which I did not see in those answers) is as a clue to some mystery. This can represent a riddle dire...
Are major mystery subplot(s) in a fantasy story distracting or make a story more appealing? More appealing. Here is an examination of the structures of Harry Potter that concludes the first four ...
In the end it's up to you, but I think you haven't explored all of your options so far. You could also alternate between the characters views to show how different the situation feels for both of t...
As a former university professor at one university, and now a full time research scientist at another, I would just add a footnote for any weeks in which the site was down. As a note, which is what...
Who is your audience? What languages do they know? If it's an international contest, are there language guidelines? If it says English Only, then be at least 99% English! Are you planning on a fe...
You have read books like this, or at least are familiar with books like this: Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls is set in Spain, and it is indicated, repeatedly, that the dialogue is in S...
The "contract" is the expectations you set. In an academic paper, it's normally the introduction leading up to the thesis. In a work of fiction, it's the first few pages (novel) or paragraphs (sh...
This is from an agent's page at https://www.mariavicente.com/blog/manuscript-formatting-submitting-sample-pages Consider the strength of your first chapter. Too often writers will submit pages ...
It's called a memoir. Memoir is a subset of autobiography, which is a subset of biography. A biography is the story of someone's life. Autobiography is when you write your own biography. Memoir...
You do not. Nowhere in Green Eggs and Ham does Dr. Seuss tell you that the whole thing is written using exactly 50 different words. It's an "Easter Egg" as @Alexander points out in a comment. It's...
The problem about this is that most of the time we want to read something about special people. Sure, we want to be able to sympathize with the character and for example superhero comics have a his...
If the set of coffee cups is something you can buy or find (outside of the movie company's website), then, yes, no problem. Use them. If the set is something not currently or formerly made but is...
