Posts by Lauren Ipsum
Mercedes Lackey's Valedmar series has established candles (of a specific although unexplained size) which burn steadily enough to be marked off and used for timekeeping. So "three marks" (that is, ...
I'd write it in the script. You have to hire someone to read the lines, and it's audible dialogue which the characters and audience have to hear and react to. GREG I've got the tea. Where are the ...
You have to identify them somehow. Use adjectives. The tall man vs. the short man The older man vs. the younger man The long-haired man vs. the man with the thistle-down hair The carpenter vs. th...
Well, what's the character's reaction to his real (waking) life? Is he bored? Impatient? Dazed? Curious? Eager? Anxious? Take us through his reactions rather than his day. John listened to his...
I'm a big fan of cheating (and I hate Word). Make each section a separate document. Start page numbering at whatever number in whatever format you need. If you need to create a TOC, use a working...
Learning to describe starts with learning to observe. If he wants to learn to observe, start with Sherlock Holmes. Once you start observing, then you practice putting your observations into words....
You've gotten a good start with the name. Part of humor comes from confounding expectations. So you have this big snarly demon... named Bob. Maybe the damsel in distress is a guy in drag who was ...
Oy. Chop, chop, chop. You establish the metaphor of the treasure chest, so you can just declare that A=B without the transitions. The plastic container was a treasure chest of food. I peeked in...
I think it's pretty much by ear. You have to go with what sounds good. In this case, the writer thought "people" was important enough to repeat. I happen to agree with you that "them" would have be...
She is audited by the ethics arm of the board which gave her her professional license. He's a former patient. The board tells her to break it off or lose her license. In the intervening two years, ...
Find a good beta reader or a good editor. I ran into this problem myself: I had a plot which was solid and detailed but left room for expansion, I had characters I absolutely loved, I spent months...
Too long. Let's add some commas and trim the redundancies: As players move around the board, they buy, rent, and sell properties from and to each other, with each player trying to maximiz...
It depends on what the "point" of the essay is, and how it's set up in the intro/thesis. If the goal of the essay is to argue "dogs make great pets," then there shouldn't be a counter-argument at ...
Why would citing "a well-known historical source" be any different from citing a not-particularly-well-known historical source? For the speech: you found the speech somewhere, right? Book, websit...
In some of them you can just drop the "I think." You can also use dialect, slang, or regionalisms. You can do it. In my opinion, you can do it. You really should take a break. Yo...
In either case, there's something missing — or maybe it's because the sentence is out of context. Just to say someone washed his hands like a surgeon is insufficient; you need more detail. "He scru...
I am reminded of the anecdote about Dustin Hoffman torturing himself for Marathon Man because he was a "Method" actor, so he'd look as tortured as his character. Lawrence Olivier looked at him and ...
You might try OmniGraffle, which is a flowchart generator for Mac. I've only seen it used once or twice so I can't speak to how well it works, but it might fit your bill.
If you didn't create an outline — that is, if you didn't know beforehand how it was going to end — then you're suffering from impeded arborvision (you can't see the forest for the trees). 1) Put ...
Cheat. Drop some letters/syllables. It's true, in po'try, it cannae be changed (Feels like "can" needs another unstressed after it, doesn't it?)
Your co-writer is a pain in the tuchus. I am sorry you have to put up with this annoying quirk of writing. That being said, I found two references so far: The Oxford Dictionaries: Bullet poin...
"Submitted by" might be your best answer. It obfuscates who the originator was (the authors/creators of the original work) and what you and your collaborator did, but the truth is, you are submitti...
If we're genuinely talking just five consecutive words: yes, that could happen by chance. But plagiarism is not just about five words in the middle of a 120-page thesis. It's lifting ideas, plots...
As a user of both programs, I would definitely say just put in a placeholder and let your designer import the images. Having them in the Scrivener text isn't going to help. You export them as Word ...
I can think of a few ways: 1) Cheat. This was how Tolkien did it, so you'd be in good company. He just listed somewhere in the appendices that "Year 5798 by Gondor's calendar = 144 Shire Reckoning...
