Well I hope they read it! Very well written, it’s nice that you don’t suggest them to change or whatever, you just want to leave (as if they would change anything to begin with, right?)
My older sister had a wild life. I don't envy her, I wouldn't have been able to survive; but thinking of her always makes me think of the Strudel we ate growing up in Salzburg.
Alas, she is with us no longer, but she killed many men in her early twenties. Which is exactly what this dish will do - it'll kill; at your next party or Sunday supper ~!
Murderers from the future were trying to kill dear A. but by God's grace, the first of them was an idiot and she stole his device. She hired a nanny to stand in her place during the usual hours she'd be alone and vulnerable, and would be able to document her poor child's murders, and then go back herself to intercept the killers, no matter how well trained and prepared they were. Well, now onto the recipé ~
I’d be interested in craft-related threads. For example, what descriptive techniques do you use or admire? My personal interest in self-promo within writing communities is low, as I think it makes more sense to promote to readers instead of other writers, but I suppose the beauty of weekly or monthly threads is they keep things organized so people can find what they want. Also, check-in or accountability threads would be fun. What did you get done this week?
Hmm, trying to decide if she's having an unusually strong adverse reaction to the drink, a coincidental event in time with a resurgence of magic (you did say it was magipunk, so I assume this means Shadowrun style and the writing fits right into that), or the start of an Isekai from a cyberpunk world into a magical one. :)
I will say I tend to prefer third-person narration while following a particular point of view closely over first-person, but it's not a make-or-break value.
Maybe something like a monthly prompt-basedwriting contest? On Reddit there’s a dedicated community for this (r/WritingPrompts) but it could be a fun addition here too.
So, disclaimer, but I definitely come from the more structured, genre side of things with my writing.
I think a lot of deciding what your ending will be has to do with what kind of story you want to tell. Most stories answer a question – will these two lovebirds get together? Will the characters escape the haunted house alive? Will this soldier live through this war, and if so, how will the war have changed him?
I would recommend nailing down what question your story fundamentally answers, and then figure out how your ending answers it. Of course, that’s a very simplified way of putting it, but I think starting out simple and building things out from there is how you can get the ball rolling on your story. Once you know how it ends, you know what pieces need to be in place for that ending to work … and as you look to see what pieces you need to put in place, you start to see the shape of your story as a whole.
Prose, for sure. I am terrible at poetry. I also find it much more open and personal compared to prose, which can have pieces of yourself but much more hidden.
Poetry is always what's spoken to me, free verse in particular. Mostly what gets me going is symbolism and imagery, and using words in uncharacteristic, surprising ways.
I have a deep love of prose as a genre and what can be done with it, but when I write poetry just comes out of me and prose is work.
Outside of combat, I have very little that needs to be described in that much detail. I do have one specific mechanism in my Living Dungeon story that I felt needed that level of detail, and the description went through a few edits to fine-tune it to communicate the idea accurately but keep the writing clean enough to not be jarring to the reader. I am fortunate enough to be able to get some feedback to help me in that process. I felt that this mechanism needed to be accurate because it is relevant at several points in the story.
The less relevant it is to story beats, the less I am worried about specific details. I have a second mechanism involving large colored, glowing crystals in a ceiling. I described the basic layout and the colors, because they were relevant to events in that room, I did not describe the shape of the crystals, because it doesn’t matter.
In combat, how much detail I go into depends on the fight. Less important/low-stakes fights get more of an overview. A duel or spar with setup and some emotional charge? I am getting down to blow-by-blow, especially if I want to show the progression of a character’s skill or power, and when getting that detailed I often need to specify which hand a person is using to do what, so that I can line up the action properly.
A right-handed person has a shield in her left hand, and therefore deflects a creature’s charge to her left, and is thus spinning left to slash her axe across the back of its leg. I could have described it as her spinning counter-clockwise, which would be more technically accurate but would pull the reader out of the story more to think about. ‘spinning left’ suffices.
So, I would mostly just try to be sure that it needs to be described in detail.
Nuclear Radiation almost killing people is probably the most problematic, there will be all sorts of long-term damage.
The sci-fi disease at least has the exact properties you want it to have, and the Alien Creature option simply gives you physical damage which comes in your choice of severity. I’d lean toward that over all, but it really depends on what fits the story best.
And might I recommend Royal Road as one of your publishing platforms? Pure fantasy tends to do better than Sci-fi, but at least it is a point of traction. I know a lot of people post across multiple platforms.
i tend to put my protagonists on at least one of the covers, so for my latest mage college book series here she is: bit.ly/45KWjnt (i blanked out the book title so this doesn’t come across as advertising or something)
What is the most dramatic way? Could another protagonist die from it when one of them chose to save the day instead? Can it be a daily ocurrance, and that guy was just the unlucky one?
Was it something just utterly mundane like having their feet stuck in something? Does that guy have actually to die to finalise their character arc in a satisfying way?
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