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I've had it say that "you can't just introduce a character like this" and insist I'm making a mistake just because it's been about 20 chapters since I first introduced the character and then had no reason to use him until now. I've had a few other moments too where it gets upset with me and I...

Initial engagement was better at RR but it didn't last. Here it's been slow but steady.

For the stuff I do on Pocket FM, when I have the time and patience to play with their AI tool, it is rewarding - it adds in sound effects and music cues and sometimes makes suggestions that are very helpful (it also, and I only found this out last week, tells me when it thinks I did something...

Heh - she doesn't bother with message boards (especially writing ones - maybe occasional political ones) and told me why she dropped the story (didn't like all the "military jargon" that crept in - 99% of it straight from Star Trek but with the serial numbers filed off, by the way - and its only...

Ah then unless I got it in one of the Amazon sampler bundles (and then it would only have been about four or eight chapters probably), it was something else. 2007 seems as far back as the 90s at times...

There are few moments that surprise me in my own writing, ever since I stopped over planning and started "listening" to the characters (I still sometimes force them to take certain paths, but not always the way I'd intended at the outset), but there are some, like realizing a side character was...

Why make it Harry Potter though? He NEEDS to go to Hogwarts due to his ties to Riddle. Now a normal-ish kid, like Tim Hunter (Vertigos Books of Magic series, but a limited series and then an ongoing one) looked a bit like Harry and even had an owl familiar (the appearance thing was...

If you mean EVER, it was when a friend of mine told me his class spent nearly 45 minutes - about 3x as long as it took me to write! - discussing a piece accepted for our college's literary magazine. One of my goals as a writer is to make people think - even if what they think is "what an...

That is fairly typical for this site.

It was a joke. Can't maintain a true dash at my age. I use an EM dash whenever editing software suggests it. Used to use it a lot - even had the ASCII code for it memorized, along with ° and a few others, but that was back in the 90s and early aughts.

Could be - was something I stumbled on by accident in the 90s I think, and just barely remember.

The honest answer is: I use them whenever spell check suggests them and I can't see a better way to reword the section (so about 2/3 of the time it suggests it).

The stories I've seen from it were all "dark future" (but with bright colors). Kind of an American version of the mag Judge Dredd debuted in (AD 2500 or something like it.) Never seen a full issue nor more than a few clips from the animated film though. Sounds like a good but challenging...

It seems ... familiar, like I've run into a very similar concept somewhere before in a fantasy novel or game or something (I think it was one where True Names were used as magic - not just the true names of People but of Things, like to attack someone with fire you needed to know the True Name...

More of an EM sprint these days.

90% chance that this is a scam. 9% chance this is just an offer to get you into a bad contract. 1% chance it's just a fisher trying to see if you have a live account it can direct future scammers to or if you are an automated uploader. If it weren't in all caps, I wouldn't consider that last...

His early stuff doesn't quite have the balance his later Discworld books hit. Strata is a science fiction story about people who designed and built a disc world (and even has a variation of the drum gag - one setting has "The Mended Drum" as a bar because "it's hard to beat" the other has "The...

Fan fiction is where most writers start, though. Some even manage to get into "writing stables" and write the official fan fictions (c.f. the television and movie tie-ins on bookshelves; every Star Trek or Psych or Babylon 5 novel or comic book is fan fiction; there are some exceptions -...

Not just authors, but all creative arts. "Popular" is almost always chosen over "good" once money gets involved.

I think Amy Paladino may have set the gold standard for snappy dialogue in The Gilmore Girls. I only put it on because it ran before Smallville. I was hooked by (how hot the two female leads were and )how the banter between them felt so natural and yet rapid fire (David Mamet is the only other...