Search
I am a professor, I peer-review scientific articles; one or two per year, in fact I did one two weeks ago. The first things I look for are correctness and understandability, particularly in any ma...
First, always include a picture of the finished product. It helps me, as the customer, realise what it is they're trying to achieve, it helps me see whether my intermediary stage is in the right di...
What criteria can I use to determine when to use words and when to use images? I think the criteria is simply real-estate. The empty box that would contain the photo or sketch. If you can describe...
Others have said Internal Dialogue, and I second that. But let me also offer an alternative. If the "demon" is a sufficiently separate entity that the character can talk to it, negotiate with it, a...
In food writing, there is a specific sub-genre for works (both short and long) that are photo-heavy, with particularly good-quality photos. Food porn. Where you draw the line depends on your audi...
It's a personal decision. For me, I wouldn't. I think your goal is to be a novel writer, not a non-fiction writer, not a research writer. Notes as you have them (or much less) is fine; at most I'd...
A companion book - it's way too early to think of that. There's no sense in writing a companion book when you haven't written the main book yet. A companion to what would it be? Once you've publish...
You absolutely can not publish this without permission. It doesn't matter if you make no money off of it. Putting something in the public domain doesn't it make it better (and might make it worse...
Full confession: I read cookbooks like novels. The best cookbooks, in my opinion, are those with great descriptions of the recipe that turn it into a story. History of the recipe or the ingredien...
It doesn't need to be much. Being a bully doens't actually mean that everyday of school you are pushing people into lockers, smoking cigarettes in the bathroom and carving death threaths on school...
The scariest bully, I think, is not the one who beats you. A punch only hurts for a short while. The scariest bully is the one who humiliates you in front of everyone. What he says, and the others'...
Use the narrator as a tool to avoid annoying the reader. The narrator controls the flow of information. Have the minions do their thing. Once. Then... The crowd clapped politely as the rule...
Added due to comments: I use LibreOffice Writer. My comments below reference it, not OpenOffice Writer. I believe these were derived from the same original code, but apparently they have diverged s...
A useful option may also be GoogleDocs, as it's free. I can't give specific examples (Gmail/Gdocs blocked at my current day-job), but I remember some students used it for peer-critique very well. ...
Beta readers. Find beta readers who are native speakers of English and give them red pens and completed manuscripts (which you've already run though Google and done the best edit you can on them) ...
Plagiarism would be taking exact text from the various game manuals and representing it as your own. So don't do that. But you probably weren't going to anyway, because you want to tell a story,...
There is a surviving account of the first meeting between Portuguese sailors and Japanese locals. What's interesting about it is that accounts of the meeting survived from both sides. The accounts ...
I set "levels," and don't include technology beyond the level. Often I only research a word, in an online etymology dictionary, to see when it originated. e.g. "linen" comes from "linum" which is t...
Your cookbook's primary function is being a reference book: providing clear recipes. My personal preference is to always have a picture of the final product, and preferably also intermediary stages...
I recall "Two Meatballs In The Italian Kitchen", by Pino Luongo and Mark Straussman. It was two chefs with different styles of Italian restaurants that got together for a cookbook. The basic prem...
A song has lyrics and music. Translating the lyrics, you'd want to keep the music. It means that as you're translating, you'd have to try to sing each line to the original music. The beats would ha...
The best appendix is one the reader never needs to use. The same thing applies to footnotes. They're there for people who want the exact reference. They shouldn't have material that you need to ...
You need to get inside her head. Everyone makes sense to themselves. She has reasons for doing things and, you might disagree, but they're valid to her. She has goals and dreams and desires. Sh...
I think chapter length matters, some of my readers have specifically complained about my chapters being uneven. Although I don't personally do this, I think some readers use chapters as a kind of p...
It's not a problem if only the final chapter does this. As Amadeus mentions, chapter length is a kind of unspoken pact with the readers. If your chapters are somewhat even around 2k words, most r...
