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I don't believe there is any punctuation to accomplish what you want. I have seen it done as you have done it, but IMO this is effective but something that should be used very rarely; it gets tirin...
Ah yes, IPA! International Phonetic Alphabet -- I had a drama teacher who had us learn to read it, (and I used to use a bastardized version of it for keeping notes), but she claimed that it could b...
I've seen dashes used for this ("Ye-s"), but I wouldn't really recommend it. For readability, using repeated vowels sounds like the better, safer option. There's no need for the reader to guess wha...
Your example doesn't look ugly, it's just something that ought to be saved for dialogue. I wouldn't use it in non-fiction, for example. Another method is to italicize the word. This example i...
It appears I'm hearing votes for Fiverr (or Amazon Mechanical Turk) - basically paying humans, (using global economy stuff to pay them less than I'd be able to get away with paying local humans, bu...
Prologues are something that need to be handled carefully - otherwise, you may wind up giving too much information about a character/world that the reader doesn't care about yet. If you have a lo...
The main thing to remember about critiquing somebody's writing is to not critique the person. What the piece is about is not a topic for criticism; what you think it says about the person that wrot...
Speaking as a research scientist, one major refinement you would need is rejection of your gods. In 400BC, Aristotle published his theory of gravity; based on the notion that objects were composed ...
I use a double-dash, and specifically a double-dash (not an em dash), on both sides of the interruption. The demon -- he? she? -- gestured toward the supply wagons. Although in your example, ...
I would do this like names from the culture. Different languages have different characteristic sounds, rhythm, and accents. Although I don't speak Spanish, Italian, German, French, Arabic or Mandar...
ARCHIVOS might be what you want. (Free account lets you build a world!) It allows you to create scenes, establish relationships between them. Characters (and relationships with them), plus a time...
I'd reject the advice to write to a sixth grade level, unless you are writing for kids or young-adults. I've seen the stats on reading levels in the USA somewhere; they must be online. But as I rec...
Write for your audience. There are certainly many audiences who might not have the literacy level (or education) to do well or want books written at a upper secondary school level or higher educat...
Prologues are usually boring, because they are almost inevitably history lessons that have no suspense or action and they feel like a history lesson, right after lunch, and a snooze fest. You woul...
Embrace it instead, and make the reader suffer for having even thought of it What you have there is a reader's commitment to a goal. They expect two characters to get together from page 1, and in ...
You cannot prevent that suspicion altogether; especially because that is your plan. Which means your two characters are heterosexual; so you can't really use homosexuality as a show-stopper. I wou...
I am not a lawyer, so this is not legal advice, but my understanding as an author is if somebody else can convince a jury that, for people that know the real person, the character in the book could...
This is one thing I think English needs: the "Ammoc" -- it looks like a comma, but backwards. It's used to indicate when one feels that for breath or speaking issues, a pause is needed, but it gra...
Trying it yourself is free. Don't send out fifty queries! Typically, the advice from agents is to find the agents that match your story (MSWL = www.manuscriptwishlist.com; another collection is ag...
What you describe in the question sounds perfectly fine to me. So if other people are telling you (or you're telling yourself) that it's not quite right, the problem isn't what you're doing, it's ...
Social media is no longer sci-fi In years gone past concepts like the internet would be considered sci-fi. Many book exist which use digital communication on a global scale as part of a sci-fi set...
It isn't science fiction, it is just Contemporary fiction, aka Realistic fiction. A Science Fiction story must rely heavily on some non-existing tech or some reasonably plausible guess at a futuri...
1. The issue In my opinion the issue is a strong prevalence of telling rather than showing. All I read in the OP was the description of some fancy lava lamp. To a reader it does not strike any em...
I never used the snowflake method myself, even if I gave it a look sometime ago. The problem with your abstract and concrete goals is that one is the specialization of the other. After all "kill...
I think an abstract goal needs to be more useful as a life philosophy than you can make "vengeance." If that is my life goal, what do I do on idle Sundays, ask neighbors if I can take some vengeanc...
