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...and the main subject of those economics were slavery. Not necessarily ending it (it wasn't in Lincoln's power to try to do so) but ending the bubble around its expansion, and in arguments where it could not actually be truly limited to one region (see, for example, the Dred Scott decision...

I think it's more common to describe the premise than a synopsis - more "here's what happened to set up the situation" than "here's what's going to happen." If a plot is boring enough for the title to fit not just the premise but a summary of the whole storyline, then that's pretty bad.

There's a Piers Anthony short story, "In the Barn" which is kind of like that: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53870317-in-the-barn (warning, seriously NSFW story. The link is just a review) Anthologized several times (originally in "Again, Dangerous Visions", then in the author's...

DxD fanfic without the harem and all the boob jokes kind of misses the point, doesn't it?

It's hard to get in flow. I hate hate hate the process of getting started writing. But when I can get into a flow, and am writing well, yeah, it's awesome. Half the time it then needs a TON of editing, and like half the chapters I've written recently are from random later parts of the book...

The defense of "generic he" is almost always either people with a political axe to grind, or non-native-speakers who had an overly dogmatic teacher drill a rule into them that isn't actually so. The use of singular "they" for non-specific individuals beats the shit out of the "he or she"...

I'm surprised that AI is producing better "show-don't-tell" than you are. I've run some of my recent chapters through AI to see what it can improve, and for the most part, it doesn't; it sucks voice out of it, and it *loves* adverbs, and spelling out emotions. Occasionally, it comes up with...

So I'm writing a story that is heavily inspired by high-school anime (and western teenage works set at schools, and school-set JRPGs/visual novels) and up until now I've had more chapters in this part than there have been days in the school year up til then. I've skipped at most like a day or...

I have at least three other stories I've been kind of working on for years and want to tell (two straight fantasy, not isekai, and one superhero story.) Do I plan to write them? I don't really make plans like that - the closest I've got to something planned is that I want to finish the second...

The original arc he appeared in made crazy little sense, but hey, it was the 1970s. I read through all of the Marvel super-hero titles from the start around Fantastic 4 #1 to part way through 1975, and just entirely ran out of steam for how weird things got.

Maybe, not sure if it counts. For the second girl I dated, we were just online friends with for a long while - we were first year in college and not nearby each other. I guess as friends we were both somewhat interested in each other as the year went on, but it didn't seem like it could be...

Tech is in the middle of a downturn and there have been a ton of layoffs recently. During the boom times, it was not that hard (in the US, not sure about elsewhere) to get a developer job with a non-technical college degree and not even that hard to get a first job with just some...

Fully justified works much better with a narrow, two-or-more-column format (think newspapers, many magazines, and academic papers) than with a full-width page, and has the added benefit of keeping a mostly-consistent width to the space between columns (possibly completely, depending on paragraph...

1000 words is plenty. Much less than that, and I'd probably just post it tacked onto the next chapter.

Not all webnovels are serials, but the format does lend itself to that. I'm 100% amateur and doing this for fun, and it's been a nice forcing function to get me to write. You can always go back and re-edit things, or even take down the story and start re-posting the revised version if you...

A peaceful, post-scarcity society (perhaps even a utopian one) which no longer has/needs a military is threatened by an inhuman army, and has to develop a military capability from scratch. Our MC is a military history hobbyist. (This works for either fantasy - "inhuman army" being orcs or...

How strong is that? There's exactly one instance of strong language in my WIP ("What an a**hole!", elided here because I'm not sure about forum filtering) and my kids used worse when they were 6, but odds are someone out there may be offended.

Pt. II, Chapter 18 is up. A bit delayed, so 19 may be up soon. If you think this (and 19 when it's up) is a bit info-dump-ish, the first drafts were worse. I may put some of it into the glossary.

Obligatory Simpsons: "So one of those egg council creeps got to you too, huh?"

Roger Zelazny who has an absolutely incredible narrative voice. The first 5 Amber books plus Lord of Light and Jack of Shadows are pretty close to my benchmarks for "best books I've ever read." Michael Stackpole, for someone who can work a ton of a real-world history into fantasy novels and has...