Recent content by buyjupiter

Ask yourself: what do I absolutely need to know to write this scene? Flesh that out then go onto the next scene and find out if there are blanks in your knowledge about how that scene would work in your world. I've found that this set of questions really gets my creative juices flowing [and I...

I'm currently writing a short story that has a flash forward scene in it. I'm a bit confused as to what tense I should be writing the scene in, since the majority of my story is in simple past tense [with a little bit of subjunctive and other more complex past tenses]. Should flash forwards...

I didnt realize I'd be using my French skills this much. I thought I was taking a useless class in school. But now I'm using it to flirt & be all chatty. & I've been using my French A LOT in the last six months. (Compared to the first 15 years post-grad)

I'm playing with a low level magic system that when it does backfire, rare tho that is, it can have catastrophic costs. It's fun, but challenging. Because at some point if low level magicks can be that disastrous then no one but sociopaths would use it and that's a whole nother story. More to...

I'm pretty sure I'd be Eowyn. Just ask anyone who knows me if storming off to battle dressed as a man and swinging swords around sounds like me. (Spoiler alert: it does.) Otherwise I'd be a mythical entwife. Or maybe Goldberry.

Vulcanism is mainly driven by tectonic plate movement, like on the Pacific Rim [Japan, Alaska, western edge of North + South America, New Zealand and on up through the Pacific Islands til you reach Japan/Russia again]. If you don't have tectonic plate movement*, you need a MASSIVE object like...

Substitute "summer" in for "winter" & that's our life here in the sonoran desert. We're in road construction season right now. By the end of February we'll hit almost summer, tho last Feb we had a day that was over 100F.

I've been struggling with this question for the last couple of years, in subbing to short story markets. Since I've started doing youtube videos for my hobby, I put the short stories that never sold/never will sell at the end of those videos. So my audience is three people who watch youtube...

I find in my writing I mostly err on the side of caution & follow Wil Wheaton's advice re: don't be a d**k. I also follow that advice irl & the most common compliment I get is that I'm really nice, so. That said, I really really, no I mean REALLY think about my stories and how they'll appear...

There were a lot of respectful "this is really generic" & that's how yours came across. There's also some old school Christian theologies that attack Jews & that's where I started going whoa nelly.

I love research and it's one thing I know I have the knack for doing, so. I'm probably not the best person to ask "how to develop a knack". Sometimes, i just have this vibe that the source I'm looking at is going to be good--& I'm basing this decision off a book description, so a paragraph...

Devor, I hope it's acceptable to post this, even tho you asked for us to wait until the OP asked further clarifying questions. But I saw some language in several of the posts to be so generalizing to the point that it's unhelpful and borderline stereotyping members of this community. *waves hi*...

To further illustrate the posts with the advice about what your character wants: Take Hamilton, the musical. Part of the musical format is to have the main character tell the audience what they want. Hamilton does this very early on deciding he doesn't want to waste his time ("My Shot"). Burr...

Basque dwarves? I mean Toulouse-Lautrec was basically Basque, at least to the Parisians, and he was definitely a dwarf. ;) Now everyone can see the difficulties of writing short fiction to market standards...I mostly kept to writing humourous SF for market, but even then there's the "how much...

I figured out a way to lessen my cast of characters to a more manageable few: talk from the founding mother's povs. This gelled for me yesterday when I found a book about Benjamin Franklin's sister, and my book on Abigail Adams was letters to and from her sisters. The research will be harder...