Posts by Galastel
Woman here. :) I think what your female character would struggle with most is that suddenly she does need her man beside her - for safety, for being treated a certain way by other people, etc. It ...
If anything, I'd say your book is too short for that age. 3rd grade is 8-years-olds, right? At that age, 25 minutes to read out loud is closer to one chapter of a book they'd be reading. At 8 year...
In Uprooted, Naomi Novik deals quite elegantly with this issue. First, she doesn't dump all the information at once, but sprinkles it where it's relevant. We lived in Dvernik, which wasn't the...
I have resorted more than once to citing Neil Gaiman's 2012 address Make Good Art. Let me quote from it here too: The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street na...
The main obstacle to fanfics flooding the market is copyright. As long as the original author holds the copyright for their work, fanfics can only live as free stuff on the internet. (Or, as Kirk p...
The problem I see with your writing, the answer to your question, is that you need to immerse yourself in your character's emotion. Put yourself in that emotional experience, in that moment. What d...
So you want to write the story of your life, but are more comfortable with verse than with prose? Why not think of it as a strength rather than a weakness? You're expressing your life in verse, rig...
Here I came upon an argument about whether a particular grouping is a genre, or a marketing term. Which made me wonder - what is genre? How strict is this taxonomy, and what purpose does it serve? ...
First person serves best to help the reader identify with the character, it minimises the distance between the audience and the protagonist. Is that the kind of connection you want between the read...
Women, like men, are quite diverse. Some are more introspective, some are less. Some think about their feelings, and why they feel a certain way, others are more concerned with their career and how...
Videogame, in a fantasy world that isn't our world. Why not make people blue, red, green? Who says their biology and skin colours have to conform to earth's? In fact, then you'd have a number of "r...
If you give the audience action, you've got to give some reason to care for that action. I wouldn't want to be reading about a whole lot of violence between some people I know nothing about - I'd h...
There are more things you can do with stakes than escalate ad nauseam. First, you can vary the threat. For example, Buffy jokes more than once about "saving the world again". The difference comes ...
There are several reasons why acronyms, abbreviations and initials would be used. Some of those reasons have to do with the reality of the relevant professions, others might be as much for the audi...
What you've got to answer for yourself, very clearly, is what emotions your android experiences, and to what extent. You mention your android has an attachment to another android. Can they form ot...
Don't think of what you're describing as "ritual suicide" - that has negative connotations. At least, it does for you, since you're not confident about the topic. Instead, think of what you're desc...
The general consensus nowadays seems to be that being in the head of more than one character is bad. We should be "on the shoulders" or "in the head" of one character, and one character only, if no...
Many online comics are made entirely by one person. Take a look, for example, at Order of the Stick. Other comics have a writer, an artist to do the inking, another artist for the colours, and yet ...
Some gestures are universally understood. For example: He nodded. or The audience burst in applause. Because those gestures are universally understood, giving them description or explan...
The first answer to your question, as everybody else is pointing out, is research. Anything you don't know about, research. Read about it to get a general picture. Look for first-hand accounts (peo...
Some references to popular songs would count as "fair use". For example, Sir Terry Pratchett, in his novel Soul Music (which is all about Rock) makes references to multiple Rock songs. For example...
The answer to your question depends on whether you're writing fiction, or non-fiction. Non-fiction If you're writing non-fiction, particularly if you're writing an academic text, being understood...
Are you familiar with G.R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire? It used to have some characters whose moral compass was strict and noble. They had a tendency to die, and leave a huge mess around them -...
Videogames with sexual content do exist. Bioware's Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises offer "vanilla" sex, same-sex sex, BDSM sex, interspecies sex. All of it loving, consenting, and heart-warmi...
Are you familiar with Bioware's games (Dragon Age, Mass Effect)? Because of the many different plot choices the game offers, a player might well find themselves returning to an earlier save-point a...
