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The lowest fertility rates are in South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong. The biggest factors seem to be careers getting in the way, and the high cost of raising kids. The highest fertility rates are in underdeveloped, dysfunctional, dangerous parts of Africa: Niger, Somalia, Congo, Mali and...

F Unless you and your childhood friends all spend your lives in one place, you will face this. Growing up in a mobile, modern world, it seems inevitable. So, what to do? (1) Get used to it. Become a lone wolf. (2) Move on. Make new friends wherever you go. (3) Marry someone you can stick...

Go write an amusing, fluffy one-shot, and stop there. See if the need to write is back. Let fluff be the gateway drug to whatever serious writing you have been doing. Or don't. We probably shouldn't encourage addictions.

The deus ex machina should be use to conclude a story with high moral drama, not to construct its shaky premise.

Okay, no kill. How about befriend? Progress from tame rat to buddy uber-meta-deity. That could work just as well as a stock progression sequence for litRPG. Probably not as many action sequences, though.

I think the punctuation in the action text is supposed to clarify the difference: 1) William scowled, " I do not like that." <-- wrong with a comma, as you say. One does not scowl a statement. 2) William scowled. "I do not like that." <-- correct with a period, I think. Scowled is an...

I prefer "said" or "asked", unless replaced to clarify how the words were enunciated. "No, I didn't even think about that", he mumbled. "Well it's not like it's all my fault," she whined. "Then stand up for what you want!" he shouted. "Is this really the best we can do?" he muttered. "I think...

Except that sometimes characters should tell each other how they feel, or else the story turns a sit-com of misunderstandings, which makes me sad. :blob_upset:

Tolkien did a scary amount of work on planning and world-building outside the text of the LOTR trilogy. The Silmarillion is basically a compendium of his background notes; I don't think he ever meant to publish it. It was formatted as a book and published after his death. Nobody really wants...

You don't need numbers. Nobody needs anything like AD&D or game levelling, if nobody is keeping score. To show character strength progression and advance the plot, you just need some spells to be harder than others. Like, the protagonist can use this spell from the early pages of their book...

Some writers historically have written a million words per year. One of them was "boys' story" writer Charles Hamilton, and another was a romance novelist who wrote something like 23 books per year. (Romance novels may be a bit thin: 55,000 words per book.) I doubt that they had any time for...

When the boy awakens his magic, does his disease continue? Otherwise it seems kind of limiting to the story potential. This prologue could be a standard backstory for a story of some kind, but I have no idea where the story would go after this. What is the idea, beyond a starting point for a...

I Googled a little bit. The US Foreign Service Institute ranks languages on the basis of hours needed to learn, for English speakers: 600 hr: Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Italian, French, Spanish, Romanian or Portuguese 750 hr: German 900 hr: Indonesian, Malaysian, or Swahili...

Sure, but Flame Witch in German would be Flammenhexe, which... maybe doesn't sound as rad? Okay, Feuerhexe. "Foy-yur-Hex-uh" Sounds rad.

I read it through. The grammar isn't so bad, although the writing for this part is very compressed and wasn't the easiest to read, overall. It left me confused, but never mind. That's at least partly just me. However, this is just the backstory: the (tragic and confusing) events that shape...

Old-style book titles like "Bleak House" are worthless except as a label: they tell you nothing. A title like "Saving Private Ryan" is more useful. "That Time I Reincarnated as a Slime" is good, but getting too wordy. Your example feels far too long to be useful as a title, but not bad as a...

Since they have heterochromia, they might get called the hetero cult, or just "those hetero guys".

Modern guns vs weird monsters can be good fantasy. Or you can throw a musketeer in with some swordsman, and still be technically correct. Modern guns vs swords is just a bit too much for me to get into the story.

I boldly recommend doing something novel - preferably something involving the so-called "outside", just to be different. (Come back and let us know what that's like, okay?)

Mix it up, and split the dichotomy... Lively and playful is just fluff; amusing, not sympathetic. Lively and determined makes good things happen; I can sympathize with that in the MC. Cold-blooded and determined can make things happen too; a bit less sympathetic, maybe. But I can really do...