Posts by F1Krazy
Footnotes informing a reader of which previous work an event occurred in are ubiquitous in comic books, but I've never heard of them being done in a novel before, nor would I really recommend it. T...
When I was a kid, I had the Walking With Dinosaurs and Walking With Beasts companion books, and I read them over and over. I didn't know a lot of the more technical terms, but I could either look t...
You're using too many beats, especially in your second example. You don't need to describe every minute change of tone while a character is speaking. It breaks up the flow too much. There's absolut...
If you want to place particular emphasis on a word in a piece of dialogue, you can use italics: "Looking and looking... in all the wrong places." There is also a convention - though admittedl...
I see nothing wrong with this, provided the dialogue and the responding action flow together neatly. Your example is a bit stilted, but if you connect them like so: "Move!" he barked, and I imm...
"Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer" does not apply on Stack Exchange. On multiple occasions, I've seen people post "answers" that are either sarcasm/jokes, personal attacks, or just plain...
The publishing model you're suggesting isn't actually all that new. Serialised novels - novels published in newspapers or magazines, one chapter at a time - were very common back in the 19th cent...
This reminds me of Life of Pi. The protagonist is a young man from India named Piscine (French for "swimming pool". I forget why he's called this, but I'm sure he does explain it). As a kid, he wa...
There's nothing wrong with starting your story with a fantasy VR sequence. This is known as a Fake-Out Opening (TV Tropes link warning!). What you want to avoid - and what you do seem to be concer...
As the other answers have stated, I don't believe re-using the story's name for the first chapter is a particularly good idea, especially if it means something different later on in your story. How...
TL;DR: First-person protagonists are never all-knowing, but if they're telling the story after the fact, they can know things they haven't been told yet. First-person narratives come in two flavou...
I've read a few books that had an "afterword" section at the end, where the author would address the reader directly to talk about the work. I know Anthony Horowitz did this with the Alex Rider ser...
Two words: Severus Snape. Snape's backstory is pretty similar to your sergeant's: James Potter, who bullied Snape at school, married Lily, the woman Snape loved. Snape consequently detests James, ...
I'd say it depends on what those numbers are. Writing "five in the morning" instead of "5am" isn't going to make too much of a difference to readability. In fact, depending on the general tone of y...
This depends on whether you're using past-tense or present-tense narration: whether the narrator is looking back at things that have already occurred, or describing events as they occur. If you're...
A "sequel" that takes place during the events of its predecessor is called a midquel (or more precisely, an "intraquel"). In your case, only the first 25% of your second book is intraquel, but the ...
As of 2017, the collective works of H.G. Wells, including The Time Machine, are in the public domain. Not only that, Wikipedia also lists over a dozen stories based on The Time Machine, almost all ...
I'm currently planning a "magical girl" story, and I thought of an interesting way to start it, rather than launching straight into the backstory. It opens with a woman in her mid-thirties, complet...
You have your main path already, which is a good start. What I would do from there is identify the main choices that the protagonist makes - the things they say or do that drive the plot in that sp...
In a third-person limited (or first-person) narrative, deceiving the MC and deceiving the reader are pretty much the same thing, since the reader only knows as much as the protagonist. In this case...
I don't see why not. If they were objects unique to a particular movie setting, like the lightsabers in Star Wars, you'd raise a few eyebrows at least, but these are literally just cups. You may as...
There's no such thing as "too early in the story for a plot twist". There's even a trope called "First-Episode Spoiler", for when the very beginning of a story contains a plot twist that's pivotal ...
In works that aren't strictly visual novels, where players/readers might not expect their choices to matter, then visual indicators work well to remind them that yes, the choice they just made will...
A while back, I redrafted my NaNoWriMo 2017 story, but it still needs another draft. This question is about one of the concerns I have. The story takes place in a medieval fantasy setting, and the...
There have been several similar books in the past, known as "armchair treasure hunts". However, these generally involve actual physical treasures that have been buried somewhere, and cracking the r...
