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My story is about two gang leaders. The female is the leader of the largest gang in the country. The guy is the leader of the 2nd-largest. They meet at a café where the guy instantly falls in love...
About 1/3 of the way through my story the main antagonist "wins" and is able to completely remake the world of the story into his notion of an ideal world. The "new" world shares some elements wit...
Apropos of the Sequence of Categories can I suggest some standardization of the naming of categories. In particular, I would suggest renaming "Q&A" as "Questions". Yes, questions have answers, ...
This was a tricky one. That Q&A page had an answer with a pending suggested edit from a user who was later deleted. We had an unsafe check there (didn't account for nil), and it broke the pag...
"Questions" seems better than "Q&A", yes. Not everything on the site will be questions. For example, a site can have a blog or a set of resources. Some sites will have sandboxes, which are p...
When we set up this site we imported from SE as of the December data dump (the latest we had at the time). We didn't have a way to get the delta; the import code didn't use the API. We now have b...
Mithical has posted the first challenge: the great outdoors! Please join us there. I hope this'll be the first of many.
That's an awesome feature and I see quite a few tag families that could profit from being officially recognized as such. Here are some more points that might be relevant to a discussion about this ...
For some reason, I can't access my flags page (https://writing.codidact.com/users/53196/flags). It just returns a 500 server error. It seems to only be only on this community for some reason; I ca...
The core of both questions is: why didn't these authors simplify complex sentence structures? It's hard to see how the answers would be significantly different for semicolons versus splitting into...
Should be fixed now - thanks!
Look at the first paragraph of the /help/how-to-ask page, under the subheading "Make sure your question is in scope". The last line of the first paragraph has been quoted below for reference. Mark...
I would write around it this way: Original: When the user requests for their visit and order to be registered in their account, a checkin is created at POS. Sounds awkward to me. Presuming POS me...
Another answer (in addition to my old answer): One approach is that your agent/publisher is going to want to know what other book yours is like, specifically "This book will appeal to readers of Th...
I will cheerfully use "singular they" if that is a particular person's pronoun, but not as a lazy substitute for "he/she." Rewrite the sentence, either as plural or as second-person. 1) When us...
I wrote an answer to a similar question a while ago: https://writing.codidact.com/questions/34255#answer-34261 Like in that answer, to be honest, I think you're spending too much time thinking abo...
It's not illegal to use religion in books. It's not like God is going to sue you.
I don't think you do keep them balanced. Or, at least, I don't think you should. If their goals are incompatible, the reader has to choose whose goals they are going to root for. And at the end, on...
Hi Mark; I had a similar observation; I proposed a new tab with some daily "random questions" from the archive, which we might be able to review and answer (or at least upvote Qs and As). We've got...
I"ve actually just written a scene in a novel, in which a recent stroke victim slurs her speech. But I don't try for "realism" in this, I write her dialogue straight; but the characters she is talk...
In any scene, you need to look at what story values are at stake. Narrative is interesting insofar as it develops or changes story values. It is boring insofar is it does not. Technical description...
Here's an element you want to consider: if I'm reading about a group of characters coming up with a plan, and then I read about them enacting that plan without a hitch, I've just read the same thin...
I think on the whole, anything that was marked "keeping only for historical value" -- those are probably delete-able. In general, how many of the oldest questions ARE worth keeping as they are? S...
Here's how I would envisage writing the on-topic page. It's incomplete---it's better written by someone more familiar with the nuances of the site. Hopefully you can understand where I'm going wi...
First person narration is a gross violation of common sense. I say this simply to point out that all forms of narrative, or almost all, are a gross violation of common sense. Who is telling this st...
