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Unexpected reunions comment section

Posted: Thu Nov 24, 2022 12:52 am
by Sgt. Howard
My boys are tumbling headfirst into this situation with little in the way of training wheels- they have my permission to use my characters, as long as they at least TRY to stay canon with fanfiction. Feel free to comment as you normally would. Enjoy.


... seems like Niel is taking the whole fam damnly to Texas. Be interesting to see how well Texas survives...

Re: Unexpected reunions comment section

Posted: Thu Nov 24, 2022 5:29 pm
by Warrl
Okay, a few notes for our young author

1) We were all young authors once. You're allowed to make mistakes - and we point them out so that hopefully over time you'll make fewer. (While we continue to occasionally make mistakes. When you're done learning, they'll bury you.)

2) On this forum (and most online forums) please put a blank line at a paragraph break.

3) Still need some practice on grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and the like. Don't completely trust computerized spelling/grammar/etc. checkers but do consider their suggestions.

4) Careful with names. Avoid having two important characters with similar names unless there's a very good in-story reason for them to have similar names (we had Patricia and Pauline, aka Dusk and Dawn, identical twin sisters - and promptly killed one of them, before the other was introduced). Even more, avoid having two important characters with the same name. Giving one of them a unique nickname and almost-exclusively using that, is perfectly acceptable. The Extended Wapsiverse already has a John, and from what I've seen so far I don't think your John is the same person. (Oh, and spell Neil's name correctly.)

(Probably not relevant here, but give your aliens names your human characters can pronounce; use nicknames if necessary. Another story has a prominent alien with a name that sounds like a dozen pebbles in a blender - nicknamed Kirk)

5) It took me a bit to realize that Charles is a horse.

6) Run-on sentences too. Example:
Tiberius walked around the library he narrowly avoided a flying kick by Dixie as she vaulted from an upper level.
Here are a few rewrites:
Tiberius walked around the library. He narrowly avoided a flying kick by Dixie as she vaulted from an upper level.

Tiberius walked around the library; he narrowly avoided a flying kick by Dixie as she vaulted from an upper level.

Tiberius walked around the library, narrowly avoiding a flying kick by Dixie as she vaulted from an upper level.
The first one can easily be read as two things happening in sequence - walk around, then avoid the kick - with maybe some unmentioned things happening in between. Or it can be vague. The third, the kick avoidance explicitly happened during the walking-around. The second is sort of in between - if the two things were in sequence, one was right after the other. Each is preferable under certain circumstances, and sometimes it won't really matter which you choose. (And there are no doubt other ways of saying the same thing.)

Re: Unexpected reunions comment section

Posted: Thu Nov 24, 2022 10:28 pm
by FreeFlier
The first spelling of Clyde is given as Clide. Tyops are a pain.

Otherwise a promising start.

--FreeFlier

Re: Unexpected reunions comment section

Posted: Fri Jan 20, 2023 2:35 pm
by Warrl
Are you composing this directly in a web browser? Not recommended - too many ways to lose stuff. Use a word processor, or at least a text editor, and save the stuff (locally) often. (Have good, frequent, automatic backups too. Currently my writing gets backed up to an external drive at five-minute intervals, and *all* of those backups are kept for at least three days. The single biggest threat to my writing is the fat-fingered idiot who's wearing my underwear.)

Double-space between paragraphs. And don't tell your word processor to do it for you - do it yourself, by hitting enter twice. Because if the word processor does it, when you copy-and-paste elsewhere you lose the double-spacing.

And then please, please, please use a good spelling and grammar checker. Maybe more than one. The one in MS Word is passable, the one at https://grammarly.com (even the free version) is better in my opinion, the one at https://prowritingaid.com even better yet - and each of them catches things the others miss. Note: none of the three is absolutely 100% trustworthy; they will all make some suggestions you probably shouldn't act on, and occasionally some that are flat-out wrong. (And so will human critiquers.) But they'll improve your writing a lot, particularly if you take time to study why they suggest the changes they do.