Australian Writers' Forum

Thank you, Paul! Right off the bat, SFF Chronicles looks interesting to me - bookmarked. (Rkcapps, you might find it interesting too, yes?)

Ah! Well, now it makes sense why prologues shouldn't be written. ;) When I wrote a (long, loooooong) story about 2-3 years ago, I thought it'd be nice to write a prologue as a "world-and-character-introducer" - i.e. it introduced the four main characters and the world they lived in. Then I...

Cage, what do you mean by "going all 'talking sword' about it"? I don't understand. Do you mean telling the reader, rather than showing him/her? :) For instance: Wenceslas, that black-hearted villain, was behind the door. I knew it. I knew it because my sword told me so. Instead, this: Som...

Well ............ in Tolkien's defence, LOTR is a masterpiece of research, revision, and persistence. People forget now that Tolkien was a Professor of Anglo-Saxon language, literature, and history, so he didn't exactly have a lot of free time, what with setting curricula for students and so on. :) ...

Of course, primary-schoolers would bring these to show and tell.

Good find. I went through these last night.

¡Dios mio, that example is horrible. I couldn't read to the end of the first paragraph, let alone the whole thing. :) That's not a fight scene, but a muddled mess. Randy has more patience than I do; I wouldn't try to fix it. I'd delete it and forget it. But I agree with everything there, it makes a ...

I'm puzzled at how writing can be reduced to the level of a game (as if it were Monopoly or checkers). ;) But there's lots of good advice here. The bit I agree with the most is this: ...no matter what your craft ... there will always be those who don't like what you do ... [but] throwing a strop aga...

Hmm ... not so much. I just checked: one story is just over 2,000 words. The others are ~1,500 and ~700, respectively.

I was once challenged to write a scene in 200 words, and once in just 100 words. I met the word count, but I'm not sure about how well they turned out.

Hmm. Not really a relation, Enzed, except that they are told in a (VERY) slightly naive first-person POV (but he learns quickly). All but one also feature a more worldly-wise (and wily, and unafraid to speak his mind) friend. ;) The first-person POV gets into all kinds of trouble on account of his n...

Yes - yes, yes, yes. :) In fact, I've been spending the last two or three weeks getting back to what I've been doing before I started taking novels seriously (in the last 2-3 years), which is writing short stories. I wrote three shorts in one day alone. That should tell you how much practice I got a...