Posts by celtschk
If you publish the initial chapter, there's one thing you should make damn sure: That the readers are guaranteed to know up front that they are reading only a part of the story. Nothing puts you do...
Just use the other possessive form: The paper of Einstein et al. stated the opposite conclusion. Although it would read better if you replaced “of” with “by”, but then it would no longer be a...
In the novel I'm trying to write, I probably will have to introduce a second point of view because my initial main protagonist will be mostly unable to act after some point. Now I'm considering to ...
One possibility on why the readers didn't find the documentation helpful may be that they are unfamiliar to the API, and the reference documentation is the only documentation available. Reference...
I noticed that only the last edit from Stack Exchange is imported, and attributed as a whole to the original poster. I think this is problematic from a copyright point of view, since if other peop...
So you have Sir Nathaniel Charles III. A nobleman, obviously. Is he from a famous family? Or some minor, not well known nobility? Did he grow up in a castle? Or did his family lose their estates an...
As others wrote, you cannot make sure the reader interprets your novel the way you want it to be interpreted. However, you still can influence it. You might read your draft and explicitly look for...
Software numbering There are lots of schemes in use, and sometimes software vendors even switched between schemes. The most important feature of numbered schemes (as opposed to pure naming scheme...
In my story the protagonist hears, in a temple ceremony, the reading of a religious/mythological text. Now in the actual story, I don't need the text itself (the role of the text in context, and th...
I think you can achieve a lot by just replacing the “was” sentence by making it an attribute in the following sentence, and making use of terms like “the first”, “the former” and “the other”. T...
Let me point out a different risk of providing a too detailed description of how the aliens learned about it: The risk of unnecessarily contradicting established science, and thus losing exactly th...
I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but I'll interpret it as distinguishing between thoughts of the first-person narrator as character when the story happened, and the thoughts of the narrator whe...
Many good answers already, and I'm certainly not an expert on this, but yet I think I can still add something I haven't yet seen, or at least not recognized, in the other answers: Tension and susp...
I don't think this is in any way specific to writing. For example in physics, there are many wannabe-Einsteins who think that if you just claim the previous physicists were wrong and dream up your ...
The first few sentences left me puzzled: Of all the people who wanted to join the trip, Paola was the the last I expected would come. It surprised me. We barely knew each other at school, and I...
Another possibility that has not yet been mentioned is magic that works differently on humans and goblins. For example, the hero could have worn an amulet that offers some magic protection for huma...
Well, the way I understand the tenses is as follows (warning: this is my personal understanding, which might not be entirely correct, especially since I'm not a native English speaker; if anything ...
A hint where you could actually place the new elements: You could put them in the island of stability. If some people expect half-lifes of millions of years, it's not much of a stretch to also put ...
Considering that many of those threads from your life probably also involved other people, another pitfall is that someone else might recognize himself in your book and not like what you write abou...
There are two lines of thought that come to my mind: First, this is a first person narrative, so the narration happens at some time after all that happened. Now, having done such a horrible thing,...
One idea might be to think of his motivation and judgement. How does he know how to comfort her? Or that comforting her is the right thing in this situation? He must have some source of informatio...
It probably depends on the protagonists. Are they themselves magic users? Or even magic researchers? Is there actually a separate magic research (like the science research system in our world), or ...
I understand the question so that the story continues after the (postponed) death. Usually the reader knows how far into the story he is, so if there's too much story left, the reader will know, or...
This was originally intended as comment on ArtOfCode's answer, but got too long for that. Listing a name on the site's Users page IMHO very clearly claims that person is a user of the site. Note t...
If it is about text changes, I'd use diff files (in particular the “unified diff” format which also many version control systems use), with a caveat mentioned below. You can create the diff file by...
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