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Your first comma isn't the problem. It's that you have an interrupter and didn't put the second comma in. Then, when the smoke had cleared, Jane rushed over to her. An interrupter is a few wo...
had achieved their goal and become immortal because you're talking about past efforts. I think the second paragraph should be in subjunctive, which is what you put in your suggested c...
I think in all three examples you're starting to impede comprehension, and change the meaning of the sentence. Example 1 sounds like the caller is cleaning the apartment of the narrator, because ...
Tolkien wrote a wonderful essay called "On Fairy Stories" in which he essentially rejected the notion of suspension of disbelief as an explanation of what is going on when a reader reads any kind o...
Try plotting backwards. The writers of House, MD often worked this way. They figured out some esoteric disease or ailment (or perhaps something not so esoteric but easy to confuse with other probl...
Put time-stamps at the beginning of each chapter, or time switch, and you should be okay. I'm not sure how you would indicate "present day" if your book starts "in the future," but that's up to you.
If you have a printer who is handling print-on-demand, what would you need an additional service for? Lay out the book yourself, or hire a designer to do it, and send the end files to your POD prin...
Capitalizing it is good, but coming up with another name for it is better. Churchill famously called it the Black Dog. Yours could be the Black Oil, or Dark Oil, or Devil's Touch, et cetera.
Cheat and edit your text. Or keep combing backwards through your layout, either pushing a few lines forward or bringing a few lines back, until your footnote and the referent are on the same page.
In Tolkien-influenced high fantasy, realm is generally used in place of country, and means the same thing. A kingdom is a country which is specifically ruled by a monarchy. An empire can be one co...
I would not write the history. The history is background and setting; some of that will necessarily come out in the first ACT (about 25% of the story) and more can be revealed in the rest of the bo...
I haven't tested this (which would require registering with them and obtaining an ID), but CrossRef provides a web service that appears to do what you need. From the documentation: Crossref qu...
Will it increase readership of my book if I rewrite it using the same software as Stacks Project book to make it available as interactive HTML on the Web in addition to currently available PDF? ...
When I'm editing technical documentation (and, ideally, when I'm writing it in the first place), I try to make every word earn its place. If both words in your phrases need to be there to make you...
If we start with the premise that character and feeling are supposed to be at the heart of a story, it follows that the description of setting is not separate, but it related to character and feeli...
A good example is the current TV Series "Elementary", in which Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Joan Watson are partners, cohabit, and although fond of each other have avoided all romantic involvement. ...
The motivation doesn't have to be massive or book-spanning. As Cole correctly notes, it could simply be "getting to the door." Or "not getting an elbow in the eye." Or "not choking from the smoke" ...
In David and Leigh Eddings's Malloreon series, one of the characters, a ruler, styles himself ’Zakath, with the apostrophe. The characters under his rule use the apostrophe; those who oppose him do...
Give the victim a reason to betray the good guys. Make the victim a rounded character. Give him or her motivation, backstory, and personality. The reader may not see all the backstory you've creat...
You need a desktop layout program, such as Adobe InDesign or Quark XPress. Don't use Word; it's a word processing program and not meant for layout. You could possibly use LaTex, but I don't know mu...
Examples 1 and 3 are fine. You can have a sharp break at the end of a line of dialogue. I'd slightly change 2. 'Come — ' He beckoned me closer with a finger. I wouldn't use a comma after an M...
It depends on two things. What your skill level is. What you feel comfortable doing. I began writing with fan fiction and fan fiction contests. (Note: these contests were loose and open. The...
You should be a Novelist. Novels get optioned as screenplays. Authors can be involved in that; Stephen King was writing for the recent TV series based on his book, Under the Dome. It isn't easy t...
You would only capitalize dragon in this instance if it meant something other than "generic name for fire-breathing reptile of fantasy." For example, in Gregory Maguire's alternate history of Oz ...
Stephen King doesn't plan his plots; at least according to his book, "On Writing." Perhaps that is more your style (and is what I like, too). King's approach is to write about a problem and do exac...
