Posts by Lauren Ipsum
As others have noted, at absolute minimum you must have someone look over your work for technical mistakes (spelling, grammar, sentence structure, vocabulary). You must do this even if you self-pub...
Accents are not decorations. Have a reason for using them beyond "I'm writing a fantasy and they look cool." (The same goes for apostrophes.) In addition to Daniel's very good answer: An accent ...
You should only attempt the style of the 17th/18th centuries if you're writing some kind of pastiche or mimicry of a book written then — for example, a Sense and Sensibility and Dragons kind of thi...
If you have a WordPress site, you should be able to create various users who have different levels of permission. Give your two or three trusted friends their own usernames with Admin or Editor per...
You can try my old buddy Scrivener. I don't use even a quarter of the bells and whistles I know are there, so hunt around the documentation and see if it's useful. I know it at least has a Goal fun...
The main way to make magic "not annoying" it to make sure it follows the rules of magical physics, if you will. Magical acts require energy (fuel). The energy has to come from somewhere to be exp...
You're probably too close to the scene to tell. My suggestions: 1) Write the scene with whatever dialogue you think is necessary. Put it in a drawer and don't look at it for at least a month. Then...
The clarifier you want is "respectively." It's fine in running copy, or even as a caption, but clunks as a header. Comparison of egocentric camera against static camera and dense sensor placem...
The only issue I have with it is that it sounds bookish — it's a narrative device. So if your character is telling this story to the reader, even if it's in the present, you'd be okay. You can part...
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Autumn of the Patriarch. I distinctly remember that when we were assigned it as summer reading between 11th and 12th grade, I got to page 40 and counted six periods — that ...
If it's something that big I would blockquote it (as you've done here for your post) and indent it, and then leave off quotes. It's not dialogue, which has specific practices for multiple paragraph...
If the moments of that events are jumbled and chaotic, then write it down that way. crashing sounds oh my god what just is that smoke? people running my heartrate starts to spike the ground is...
The readers only know what you tell them. If you want the reader to realize your narrator isn't telling the truth, the truth must get to the reader around your narrator. Your narrator can be cau...
I think @jm13fire has the right idea: use accents, and give readers a quick pronunciation guide at the beginning. I would go for a caron over a C, which looks like č, as ç (with a cedilla) is used...
"Could" in the first one is just the past tense of "can," as you correctly note. In the second example, you are referring to a possibility in the "farther back" past. "Could Tom's mother have been...
Please note I am describing American English punctuation convention, where the quotes go outside the final punctuation mark. I am aware that British English punctuation is handlded differently. Th...
How do your users read and use the manual? If they use it as a textbook, where 95% of the readers start at the beginning and progress through to the end in linear fashion, then put all the new inf...
Off the top of my head, CJ Cherryh's Morgaine saga (female mage, male assistant), three or four books, no romance. (removing this per @what's comment below) ETA so wow, it turned out to be a lot h...
If it means that much to you, have a pronounciation guide up front — not an appendix, but before the main text. And then just sigh and accept that half your readers aren't going to get it right any...
(This might get good answers on WorldBuilding SE also.) I think you have to decide, from a storytelling viewpoint, how these people communicate. Does each individual have his/her own thoughts but ...
Yes, the narrator can be a secondary character. The beautiful Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller is about the warrior Achilles and his life, but told by his lover Patroclus. The Great Gatsby is...
I had a poetry teacher who talked about "tired language," referring to clichés like this. Take your original metaphor apart and break it down to the real, concrete, non-representative ideas. Are ...
Successful example: Arthur C. Clarke's Rama series. The first book, Rendezvous with Rama, read to me like a history book written 50 years from now. Very hard sci-fi, technical, a bit dry. The next ...
The reflection character, as I understand it, is literally someone who reflects the protagonist: someone who echoes parts of the protagonist's character or situation to expose the subtext and make ...
Just because the reader knows the reason for the Bridging Conflict doesn't mean the characters will be able to overcome it. In your example, even if the reader knows all the extra security measure...
