Thank you and I am subscribed to her YouTube channel.
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He has an adorable face.
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Heh, one of the fan banners he gets is “You ain’t just a pretty face”. But yeah, it never hurts a figure skater to be easy on the eyes, given how much camera is on them.
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Lol!
Still, he looks adorable.
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Oh, you should see him skate… 
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Lol, i have the silliest reason not to write. I managed to catch a nail on my thumb at the door like a klutz this morning, and now it hurts after a workday. It’s not much of an injury but typing is hard. Hopefully it feels better tomorrow, because I need to do a lot of club reading and commenting! But, i guess, no writing.
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Those always suck. I’ve never had one hurt so severely that it messed me up more than a day…but if it does, a liquid bandaid will likely sting at first, but it would bean air barrier, helping with the pain.
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With a story like Tales of Alterra, I feel like it would work much better in Third-Person. Still, part of me wants to write it in First-Person because I am interested in Faust and diving into her mind. However, there is so much worldbuilding and more that writing in First-Person can potentially ruin that especially if I am not great at it. Pretty much this is me not knowing what to do with this story. It is just this time it is the narrative.
I am going to have to write a long paragraph for my story in both first and third person to see which one I find more appealing and better for the overall story.
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I’m making decent progress on the chapter and am so close to finishing it (maybe 1-2k words left). I wanted to have a conversation between my MC and his love interest about the trauma and hurt in their past, and I ended up framing it through the lens of meditation, which didn’t seem like a good idea when I initially began writing their conversation but ended up working pretty well. Also, this exploration of trauma gave me the opportunity to draw parallels between the different and unhealthy ways that my MC, his dad, and his love interest cope with trauma, to make a critique of how toxic masculinity affects these three characters in different ways. On a side note, a couple of days ago, I entered my last year as a teenager and the prospect of turning 20 in a year low-key scares me.
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Thank you. It’s feeling better today, but typing is still super-awkward. So, just going to finish reading and commenting and let the finger heal.
Sorta off topic: I hope my “Ask me Anything” thread pulls through.
LOL!
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Have you ever looked into free indirect style? It’s when you write in third limited but stay quite close to the mind of the pov character.
I was very pleasantly surprised when I learned about it because it turned out that I’ve been doing it all along. I’ve had well-intentioned critics tell me to fix my writing because I wasn’t putting thoughts in italics. My reaction to that was that if I put all thoughts in italics, the book would make you dizzy. They’re everywhere. At least now I know how to justify what I’m doing. It’s not “wrong.” It’s a stylistic choice.
To demonstrate what this looks like, here is how character thoughts can be conveyed.
- Domi watched Andrei skate, thinking, ‘He ain’t just a pretty face, but it sure doesn’t hurt.’ - (this could be in single quotes or in italics)
- Domi watched Andrei skate and thought that he wasn’t just a pretty face, but it sure didn’t hurt. - I’m telling you what she thought.
- Domi watched Andrei skate. He wasn’t just a pretty face, but it sure didn’t hurt. - free indirect style.
Do you see the difference? In free indirect style, you skip all signals that you are now going to quote the character thinking and you just stay with the character. This is much smoother, in my opinion, as it doesn’t interrupt the flow from action to character thought.
What goes great with it is psychic distance. This is the practice of zooming in and out of the pov. So let’s use Domi again (Domi, I hope you don’t mind).
The room was dark and quiet. The only source of light was a tv. - We’re very far in the psychic distance. We’re above the character, overlooking the scene.
The glow of the tv reflected on Domi’s face as she gnawed on her lip. - We’re closer now, looking right at the character.
“You can do it, Andrei,” she spoke to the boy on the screen, though he surely couldn’t hear her. Or could he? What if by some magical power she could transfer all her love for him so he could actually feel it and that helped him with the Olympics?
Andrei smiled briefly, and she gasped. He felt it.
lol - sorry, it turned into a fanfic of sorts, but did you notice how it went from far to intimately close? You can’t do that with first person.
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I never heard of free indirect style.
This sounds pretty interesting yet just a bit tough to pull off for me.
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Oh wow I didn’t know free indirect style was a thing! Honestly, I think I have a mix of all 3 in my writing. I guess I should probably try to pick on style and throw out the rest… Anyway, this was interesting to learn about even though you weren’t replying to me. Going to have to do some research on it now xD
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I don’t think there’s anything wrong in mixing it up. Use whichever feels right at the moment.
I usually use quotes or italics if my character is thinking something to themselves. I don’t use the second one much because it feels pointless. I’m in this character’s pov. Whose thoughts are they supposed to be? Of course, this character’s.
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Same.
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In 1st, I use it for the more sarcastic comments to have them Moore voices to themselves.
It’s more important to stick to whatever format you’re using withing a given novel or if you’re switching it up to be consistent in how you switch things. I mean, affectations are common enough that people should be able to just jump with each style. Should.
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I’m back to working on revisions for my last book. Making a revision plan right now, and I’ll say it’s so absolutely hard re-envisioning my story so the inciting incident happens in chapter 1-2. It currently happens in chapter 6 
Ramble Alert:
I’m completely stuck in the mindset that the reader needs to become empathetic with the MC and his life before the big disaster that changes everything. It’s a sort of portal fantasy/weird fiction book, where the MC learns how to say goodbye to everyone he lost growing up, while in the mean time trying to defeat the big bad external conflict and go back home.
The entire premise is built around the idea of grief. And I don’t want to start the book with, MC sad 
I want to start the book with warm emotions and humor and reminiscing and internal struggle and something to ground readers down before I throw everyone into another realm where MC meets his dead mother and some weird formless god and the setting is a surreal landscape shaped like a crying face, and I just don’t think I could do that in 2,000, maybe 4,000, words.
At the moment, I’m thinking I might be able to shrink it down to chapter 4… but that’s still a bit late for Wattpad standards, isn’t it?
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Aww, I had been fanfictioned 
next I will walk through a portal and learn a spell that will make him jump every quad and totally win Olympics. But it was all a dream…
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Don’t force it. Keep the first chapter interesting to get the reader engaged.
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