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Read from the bottom up. It derails the comprehension so it's much easier to see individual words, and you catch many more typos and dropped words.
There are some different diagnoses that might be appropriate here. The Xander You've clearly established how the character came to be involved, but now that he is, he doesn't seem to actually b...
Give him his own story so he's not stealing scenes in someone else's. If he's that awesome, he should be starring in his own book rather than sucking all the oxygen out of this one.
I see two separate paths you can take: 1) You might have to back up and set down some rules for the writing before developing rules for the judging. For example, if one of your judging rules is "...
No, it doesn't work, and no, I don't think you're using the technique correctly. When you use descriptions attached to someone's name, it is to differentiate them from someone else with that name....
After reading the entire piece (from the link you posted), I'd say the story feels like it's all cut of the same material, so you don't have anything to worry about in terms of most of the dialog b...
If your concern is the how-to of changing perspective, you can do it a few ways, but the idea should always be that you finish one beat, and the next beat starts the different time-voice: 1) End ...
Knowing nothing about APA formatting, I would say that the material in quotes should stay quoted — use "our," since it's a direct quote which you immediately cite. I don't see a reason to change th...
It's a phrase in English, not a word: "Separating the wheat from the chaff."
Here's a great article by Mette Ivie Harrison: How To Write Romance (in Fantasy), published in OSC's Intergalactic Medicine Show. I think it's particularly appropriate to your question because it f...
If the process you're trying to describe is complex or can be looked at in two different ways, you can explain it pretty much in those words. Because inside your story, the same tension and double-...
Prices of goods have nothing to do with cost of production. They are entirely determined by what people will pay for them. Goods that cannot be produced for less than people will pay for them simpl...
Define Your Goals. "Breaking into professional writing" is a very loose definition. It could mean somebody who's only ever published a single book or a single short story; it could be somebody who...
Critique groups are great for getting typical reader reactions, and for spotting major flaws. That's certainly immensely helpful for improving your book! But a critique group is much shakier when...
I agree with Neil. It doesn't matter how pretty it sounds if the plot is weak. Present your plot first, in outline, bullets, summary, however it makes sense, and have them beat the crap out of that...
1) As far as concept, there's nothing to improve. I like this quite a bit. The mystery and the philosophy dovetail nicely. There isn't a lot of action, and whatever "happens" is occurring in dialog...
People generally speak with "um" and "huh" peppered throughout their speech. Their meaning can be defined in a general sense, but that meaning may not always be consistent, and some of their meanin...
A little riffing, a little planning. I tend to sketch out a scene in notes and bullets beforehand, so I know more or less where it's going and what I want to accomplish. I'm "watching" the charact...
Each character or set of characters has their own arc. "How will this develop?" is that arc. The simplest way to tie all the arcs together is to set them all in the same period of time. Try start...
1) Does the story have to be from the POV of the necromancer? Or at the least, does the end have to be? You can show all the necromancer's challenges from the POV of the people of the nation, and ...
If you did it for educational credit, put it with Education. If you did it in a field which happens to be the one in which you got your degree, but your university didn't care one way or the other...
You are definitely improving from your previous work. :) Minor fixes: My corrections are in italics; do not add the italics to your story. "No other human presence" makes me wonder: is there a ...
Just a reminder: I need your feedback by this Tuesday, 10 April, before 2pm. Thanks!
First of all, you have a tense disagreement: "we had undergone" is past, so you need "confused" and "made." A few variants: ...made us re-experience Descartes's proclamation: "I think, therefor...
Critiquing specific text is important, but you can always improve the writing. If the book has structural problems, weak characters, or sections that don't mesh with each other, then these larger i...
