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Assuming native speakers of American English: For first names: John Jack Mary Jane For last names: Doe Smith Jones Johnson Full names: John Doe is native English shorthand for "generic ...
It's dry because there's not much emotion there. You're telling us a lot, but you're not showing us much. You have two instances of her being "puzzled," but the rest is just a description of her mo...
I don't think the information is entirely unnecessary, but it's dry. Lauren gave a good answer about adding more feeling; in this answer I'll focus on another style issue. You have a lot of "she ...
In general, "First [X] Rights" means "the right to be the first person/entity to do [X]," or "...to publish this piece in format [X]." "First Electronic Rights" means first publication in a digita...
From the opening, the style feels distinctly noir-ish to me. Short, choppy sentences; curt tone; detached musings about humanity - I can just imagine a hard-boiled private detective narrating the f...
Critters, one of my favorite workshopping sites, addresses this question: Is sending through the group considered publication? In a word: No. Editors recognize the utility of critique grou...
Yep, works for me. Particularly if this is the literal opening of the story, not just the scene; I like to establish some sort of setting fairly early on. You don't linger too much. You're giving u...
Conflict is fairly simple: Someone wants something. S/He/They cannot get it. What does s/he/they do about it? So your optimistic TECH can be the solution to the problem, rather than the proble...
If you are both publishing independently, then it doesn't much matter. Write up a contract spelling out everything, you both sign two copies, and Bob's your uncle. Examples of "everything": John...
Everything in your story should serve your story. The setting, the geography, the era, the culture, the time of day, the weather, the characters, their gender, their names, their descriptions, thei...
Well, "productive" and "accomplished" are two different goals, so don't lump them together. If you want to be productive, carve out time to write. Period. Sleep less, give up a hobby, write on you...
When you have "bullet points," the character you use for the bullet is irrelevant. If you can't mix full sentences and fragments with bullets, you can't mix them with "hyphen points" either. So the...
Refer to people the way you think of them. If you think of him as "Alan," refer to him as Alan. If you think of your Japanese friend Goto Sumiko (where Goto is her last name) as "Goto," then use th...
The simple solution is to use in writing whatever units are most appropriate at that specific spot in the text (probably with a heavy overweight toward the units the reader will be accustomed to, s...
You already have a rival: Time. Or Circumstance, or whatever your plot complication is which keeps the lovers apart because it's the Wrong Time. Isn't it even more tragic/angsty/yearning that the...
In her writing book Plot, Ansen Dibell discusses the technique of mirroring characters - two characters who are alike in many ways, and different in others. This gives you a "compare-and-contrast" ...
Yes, the paragraph is explicitly comparing Drew Houston to Steve Jobs, in both dress and demeanor. It's an artistic way of dropping in the information. It varies sentence structure, and sometimes...
There are almost no rules which have "no exceptions." (Which ones are the "no exceptions" is an exercise left to the student.) Your writing tends to be flowy and lyrical. Tightening it up does ad...
I think you need to consider the context. Is the swearing important or decorative? "James swore under his breath" is not the important part of that scene; the important part is that he can't find ...
I'd write it as: "With all these new personalities floating around, it's a shame we can't find one for you." — Holodoc to Tuvok, "Infinite Regress," Star Trek: Voyager I'd find it weird to h...
You can only do this if the entire section is narrated this way. If you are doing the entire chapter/scene/section etc. from the five-year-old's perspective, it will work. What you cannot do is hav...
First person narrative is just a device, and it doesn't necessarily imply that the narrator lives through the story. For example, plenty of horror stories end with something on the lines of: An...
There are two reasons. First, as described in this answer, news articles are written as an inverted pyramid and are designed to be cut at any paragraph break and still work. In the late stages of...
The rule of thumb about italics vs. quotes is "big things get italics, little things (or pieces of big things) get quotes." If it's the name of a book or magazine, italicize it. If it's the name...
I understand the question so that the story continues after the (postponed) death. Usually the reader knows how far into the story he is, so if there's too much story left, the reader will know, or...
