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While there are various venues and services which make it possible for you to make a bit of money off your book, it is unlikely in the extreme that you actually will. The only way any of these serv...
Imagine the situation: You pedal uphill, your muscles are aching, your face is a grimace of pain. There is resistance (called gravity) which does not want that you reach the top of the hill. Where...
Scrivener, a program by literature and latte, will help with this. This is just one of the features--it's super-advanced and a complete lifesaver for anyone writing anything. I use it for scripts a...
GNU Timeline is a basic timeline building application with some nice features. It is free, and it works on Windows and Linux (Probably Mac also). http://thetimelineproj.sourceforge.net/
Here are a few techniques I've used. Free Write For 15 minutes, write constantly. Don't stop to correct spelling, fix mistyped words or pause for ideas. If you can't think of anything keep writ...
I recently read the assertion that many great works of fiction were chiefly down the contribution of a good editor. I must admit I was a little taken aback by this statement. I had never really tho...
There are very few, if any, paying markets for Flash Fiction. There's not really a large market for readers of flash fiction, so it's not worth the investment for most places to pay for them. A lot...
The best way to avoid this problem is to understand your characters as deeply as possible, and remember that it is the character who should speak, and not you, the author. The things characters say...
I would say that the newest, and in my view most promising, trend in in the use of lightweight markup languages, specifically Markdown, reStructuredText, and ASCIIDoc. Both commercial WYSIWYG too...
I wrote a small productivity application, Tomate. Since I'm not a native English speaker, I'm afraid the description of the project may not be clear enough for potential users. Can you help me impr...
Of course there is narrative fiction without conflict. Example: Adalbert Stifter's novel Der Nachsommer describes the idyllic life and growth from childhood to maturity of a young man during Bied...
I'm writing a short story for my english final - I'm a junior in high school; we've already taken our AP exam, but our teacher wanted to finish the year with something meaningful. Anyway, I have b...
On bolding: Assume that on a casual browse, the reader's eye will always leap first to headers, and to words in bold. They'll help him understand the structure of your piece, and the most important...
I am editing my first novel and wherever I find a natural break in the story, I add a few spaces. I want to go back and adjust what types of breaks those are, but how best to represent those spaces...
Apparently it's some sort of "pro-am" site. I applied to be a travel writer and they, uh, picked me. I'm curious if anybody knows where examiner.com is on a 1 to 10 scale where "1" is "Applicatio...
I recall seeing the word "Ends." placed at the end of documents to indicate that, obviously, nothing else follows. Is this acceptable standard usage? It feels rather archaic (not that that's necess...
This is basically a question of marketing strategy. The major pro of DRM is that it helps avoid pirating; the major con is that it limits accessibility and portability, and can annoy readers and ...
As I mentioned in my edited version of the original question, this is a question that was presented to one of the other writer's groups that I am a part of, and I wanted to see what folks here thou...
While this isn't Graphic Design SE, my first impulse is to say "Change the COLOR SCHEME!" White text on black is seriously painful to read. Make it black text, larger, on a white or light-colored b...
The more work you do yourself, the more money you get to keep. It's a sliding scale. Full-bore old-school publishers do almost all of the work beyond the writing, and they like to keep most of the...
Every time I try to write a poem I find myself incredibly stuck. It feels to me like poetry has so many different aspects- meter, structure, rhyming, lingual aesthetics (not to mention semantics), ...
All stories are morality plays. That is, they all deal with moral questions and moral choices. They may express very different moral viewpoints, but to make a satisfying story, they have to speak t...
I would like something in which I can set targets - like write/edit 10,000 words a week, set a final end date for the project, set mini targets, track any lag etc. The only PM software I've used i...
I haven't actually seen any movies specifically about writing that are particularly inspirational. Writing is not the most movie-friendly of activities. I find the movies that give me inspiration ...
The way to play this depends heavily on what you're trying to achieve with your antagonist's secret goal. The key concept here is that every major thread should have some set-up and introduction in...
