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I am not a lawyer; but copyright law is clear: Everything is copyrighted, including individual stories within your work. Read about Fair Use, but everybody is subjected to that. The same link, fro...
If you live in one of the 175 countries that are signatories to the Berne Convention, then your work is automatically copyrighted when you create it. Registration is not required to have copyright...
I think you are still TELLING and not showing. I think you must have intended a paragraph break before "Jack talks too much," if that is supposed to be a thought of the narrator. With that assumpti...
A couple of other ideas that haven't been suggested yet: The protagonist gets lucky. He's off chasing an unrelated (or seemingly unrelated) lead or clue, and just happens to stumble across eviden...
Plodding discovery. The hero is investigating many persons or places connected to the bad guys, and at one place happens to learn some big deal is supposed to be delivered on Day X. He doesn't know...
Readers are not really interested in getting to know characters "physically". Readers are primarily interested in whatever it is about the character that makes the most difference to what the char...
As a reader, what would you like to know about a character? Their physical look? Their friends? Their talents? Their thoughts? Usually you would need some physical description, but also deep though...
Aside from the third item being correct, as others have noted, the punctuation around the dialogue tag reflects how it interacts with your two pieces of dialogue. An ellipsis indicates that the s...
You can also switch, the "we" dynamic establishes you and another person, you can also address them individually, or impersonally, as a teacher might. I've done this in highly technical instruction...
When a reader says "I'm reading (CHAPTER X), and I'm not interested", the first step to solving that is to ask: Wait a moment, what in (CHAPTER X) should be interesting? This is a crucial question...
As a quick preamble, note that I am not a professional writer, and therefore I am not speaking from experience. From the sounds of it, you've tried the sensible approach. I'm going to assume that ...
I have worked from home for over fifteen years, I treat it like a job, with minor laxities (but not in my schedule). I have a separate cell phone which is the only number I give for work colleagues...
I don't know how that specific site works, but technically I would consider it published, you have made it available to the public. By doing so, you have potentially damaged their sales and their ...
Don't abandon it, just put it aside. There is a difference between abandoning it and putting it aside to work on something else. At the point when you cannot stand working on it anymore, and stil...
I have seen capital letters after colons if what comes after the colon is a full sentence: These rules have only one purpose: They are meant to humiliate. If you remove the subject and verb,...
You can't. 13 year old boys don't care about pocket squares. Period. End of story. There is a vast overemphasis in the writing community on how things are written. The emphasis should be on what ...
I am analytical by nature, even as I am writing new stuff. My recommendation would be to make a copy and actually go analytical, as if it were written by somebody else (and it really was, you are ...
Naturally in dialogue or thoughts, sparingly in exposition. Adverbs are communication shortcuts, the reason they are disdained is that they are usually vague and do not evoke an image or experienc...
Yes, but as you said it also depends on the genre. Here is an article, why a first author should write to word count. Basically, science fiction and fantasy (your main genre) is 110,000 words, and...
There are two reasons for a reader to read something, because they are interested in the subject matter and because they like how it is written. The risk of using humor in business or technical w...
Stories can make the game very much more immersive. That said, it depends on the game. We don't have to know a back story in order to play Battleship, or fight zombies, or shoot bad guys on one si...
I think it is important to remember where these creatures came from. They are all religious in origin, and as such represent fundamental religious themes that have a corresponding resonance in the ...
Going to writing conferences will increase you chances that a literary agent will read your manuscript, compared to the chances if you simply submit over the transom. It will not make it a more pub...
I do not think you would get accurate feedback, because in a synopsis like that the readers are not invested enough in the characters and story, and the twist is likely to leave them flat. The key...
Start with introspection. Your friends said some things you wrote were creepy; so it sounds like you did not even think so until they told you so. What was creepy about it? Do you write cold-blood...
