neokitty (on a dragon kick)

I hate to bother you all, but I need a little help.

This is a first draft, and I'm not that great of a writer, so obviously the writing still needs work. My real concern is my ability to describe actions. Can you understand what's going on? Do you have any advice?

Q folded in his wings tight to his body and let his tail stream out behind him. The wind rippled his fur; his closed his eyes and let out a whoop. This was the best part, the fall. That incredible thrill of plummeting toward the earth like nothing in the world mattered. Like this was all there was. This was life, this brief moment of bliss.

He opened his eyes and unfurled his wings. The wind gathered under them and whipped them back, but he clenched his fangs and lifted his head toward the sky. He struggled against the air for a few moments in vain, then suddenly his wings struck downward, lifting him. With a few more powerful strokes, he was rising again. He rose higher and settled into an air current, his heart slowing as he relaxed and let the breeze do the work.

“That was a good one, Q,” A second dragon sidled up next to him, grinning.

Q shied away from the dragon as far as the current allowed. “Flap off.”

“Aw, come on, Q. You gotta be good at something, eh? Might as well be flying, since, y’know, you’re about as flammable as a wet log. Ahahaha! Oh, I kill me! Ahahahaaa!”

Snarling, Q rolled to the side and dropped out of the current. He tucked in his wings, but the thrill wasn’t there. This was getting old.

“Oi, aye, hey there, hoo there, neighbour! Hi, hello! Slow down, eh?”

“Go ‘way, Braddy,” Q sighed. “I just wanna be alone for a bit.”

The little sparrow dived after him, chattering as he went. “No way, nuh-uh, no how! You’re my bud, my pally, my frienderooni, I’m not just leaving you like this! What’d I say, huh, what’d I tell you, eh? They don’t mean a thing, not an ounce, zip, zero, nadda!”

“Yeah, yeah, Bradwin. Do me a favour and shut up, all right?” The lake was drawing closer; Q flicked out his wings for a second to slow his descent, levelled himself out for a moment, and then dipped his head and tucked in his wings and legs to streamline himself. He cut through the surface of the water and sank into the depths. Everything was chilled, dark silence, a welcome refuge.

When he could hold his breath no longer, he brought his wings down once, twice, three times until he broke the surface and found himself nose-to-beak with Bradwin.

“Ah, Braddy, get outta here!” he laughed, splashing the little bird.

“Hey, hoo, whoah-ho! Twigs and feathers, Q!”

Note: Q is a dragon who can't breathe fire, and the other dragons poke fun at him for it all the time.

Please and thank you. :3

I love dragons, but I'm sad to say that I've read only a few books about them. I'd prefer something where the dragons are the good guys (or there are good and evil dragons), but really, I'm good with anything that has a dragon as a main character.

I've read Eragon and Eldest (though I was not a fan of Eldest), Dragon Rider by Cornelia Funke (which I loved), and some of DragonSpell by Donita K Paul (didn't read far enough to know if I like it or not), and dragon movies I've seen and loved include How to Train Your Dragon (which is my favourite movie ever, and I'm totally going to read the books, even though they're for kids), Dragonheart (awesome movie), and Spirited Away (if that counts, lol). I'm going to buy the Dragonology book at some point (not a novel, I know).

I'm almost twenty, but I've no issue with reading young adult books. Also feel free to suggest manga/graphic novels or movies.

Thank you. :3

I've been writing for a few years now, and I've yet to finish writing anything, barring a short story for high school creative writing. I'm pushing myself to do my own novel writing month, and it's going all right so far. However, I've already begun to get discouraged; although I loved the idea when I started to go with it, I'm now beginning to think it's stupid and that it's silly of me to spend the rest of my month writing it.

Before you tell me to think of an idea I like better (it's certainly what I'd suggest), I'd like to mention that this has happened with every story I've tried to write. No matter how much I love the idea or how much time I spend weighing the pros and cons, I always want to give up within the first few chapters. I'm trying to push through and just write the darn thing, but I keep thinking how stupid the story is. If I try to lay off for a bit and go back later, I restart everything and wind up in the same position all over again.

What I'm really asking is how do you personally keep yourself in high spirits about your work? What would you suggest I do to keep myself encouraged?

BQ: Do you have someone who supports you indefinitely in your writing, giving you encouragement and pointing out your mistakes? If so, who is it? (Can I borrow them? XD)

Just for fun (and partially because I'm trying to decide on something for a story).

So, what do you think would be the worst animal transformation you could be stuck with if you were a shape shifter?

I'm thinking a goldfish. With a three second memory, how would you ever remember to turn back into a human? XD (Yes, I know the three second thing isn't actually true.)

BQ: If you have one, what is your main character's favourite animal? Or, what's your favourite animal?

Lawl, suggested category: Sports > Cycling

Posted this last night and only got one answer. Hoping for more this time. XD

She's a wood faerie who's also a thief and a compulsive liar. For most of the story, she pretends to be the princess of the faerie kingdom, who was kidnapped several years before. Anyway, she needs a name, but I can't decide on one. Which do you think? (The princess's name is Mercuria, by the way, if that helps out at all.)

The list of names I've been trying to choose from:

Mahogany

Dandelion

Hawthorne

Sawyer

Mallow

Montague (Monty)

Also feel free to suggest other names. I'd like something botanical, since she's a wood faerie and all. (Yeah, I know Sawyer and Montague aren't botanical, I just like the names. XD)

Thanks in advance for the help. I'm very indecisive. :/

She's a wood faerie who's also a thief and a compulsive liar. For most of the story, she pretends to be the princess of the faerie kingdom, who was kidnapped several years before. Anyway, she needs a name, but I can't decide on one. Which do you think? (The princess's name is Mercuria, by the way, if that helps out at all.)

The list of names I've been trying to choose from:

Mahogany

Dandelion

Hawthorne

Sawyer

Mallow

Montague (Monty)

Also feel free to suggest other names. I'd like something botanical, since she's a wood faerie and all. (Yeah, I know Sawyer and Montague aren't botanical, I just like the names. XD)

Thanks in advance for the help. I'm very indecisive. :/

...fantasy RPGs and adventure games? I've been looking for more video games to play, but I don't know which ones are good or that I'd like.

Here's a list of my favourites:

Any and all Pokemon games

Final Fantasy (I've especially enjoyed the GameBoy/DS versions)

Kingdom Hearts series

The World Ends With You

Odin Sphere

Tales of Symphonia/the Abyss

Spyro series (haven't played past A Hero's Tail...heard they started to suck big time. I mean, come on, no horn charge? Wtf.)

Super Mario Bros and Super Mario 64

Silent Hill (Homecoming is my favourite so far)

I also like puzzle games (like Professor Layton) and games with intriguing story lines, and I adore cute games. Not a big fan of gore (Silent Hill is the exception.)

I prefer PS2 or PS3 and Nintendo DS games. I'm not a big fan of Wii games (too much flailing), although I am buying Epic Mickey when it comes out at the end of the month. Feel free to suggest older games (GameBoy, GameBoy Color/Advance, Nintendo64, Gamecube, Playstation), as Amazon is one of my best friends. :3

Bonus Question: If you have played it, would you recommend Dante's Inferno?

Just curious. My personal favourite is Juliet.

Feel free to give more than one name. :3

Okay, this is the beginning of some story I'm never going to work on again. However, it's a good example of my writing style, which is what I want critiqued here. Again, I want your opinions on my writing, not the story!

Please refrain from simple answers like, "It's good!" "It sucks!" "You fail at life, go die!" I'd like to know the reasoning behind your thoughts. :3 (Also, this is a first draft, so I expect you to find mistakes.)

Here goes:

I kicked off my shoes as I entered the room and fell onto the couch. My face landed in a pillow; I didn’t even bother to move from the mildly uncomfortable position. It had been a long day, a very long day, and all I really wanted to do was spend the next ten hours being dead to the world.

“Kylie!”

I groaned as a very energetic twelve-year-old landed on my back and started shaking my shoulders. I tried to swat him away, but my pitiful attempts failed to bring the desired result.

“Jake, go away,” I mumbled into the pillow. “I’m not in the mood.”

“Come on, Ky, you told me we’d go play soccer tonight,” he whined.

I rolled over and glowered up at him. He was a heartbreaker in the making, with wild brown hair that refused to be tamed and large blue eyes that looked completely innocent, even when he was in the middle of replacing your shampoo with a ketchup-mustard-soy sauce combo.

“Can’t we go tomorrow?” I complained.

Jake shook his head and grabbed me by the wrists to haul me to my feet. I went limp to hamper him with dead weight, but he compromised by dragging me off the couch to the space between the dust ruffle and the coffee table. I stayed there, immobile, not caring that my face was mashed into the carpet and the leg of the table.

“Nooooooo,” I droned.

“Yeessssss,” he answered, now pulling my ankles. “I’ll drag you out to the car!”

“Don’t you dare touch my car,” I warned him. “Keep your fingers off my Camaro.”

He immediately let go of my ankles and began backing toward the door.

“I’m gonna put fingerprints all over the windshield,” he told me. “And I’m gonna dump that weird bowl of mac’n’cheese in the back of the fridge in your backseat!”

I was on my feet in an instant, tackling him to the ground as he turned and made for the kitchen. We wrestled on the carpet for a minute or so before I pinned him to the floor with my six years of extra weight.

“Okay, okay, fine,” I panted as he lay obediently underneath me. “Go get the ball while I change.”

“Okay!” he replied happily. He leapt to his feet and darted to his room when I released him.

I made my way more slowly to my bedroom, my feet aching from my sixth night in a row of working. The last thing I really wanted to do that evening was to play soccer with my hyperactive little brother, but it was either that or come home on the night of our parents’ return from vacation to find the house completely trashed and my butt on the line. With much weariness, I shed my work clothes and pulled on instead a pair of gym shorts and an old t-shirt that was already covered in grass stains from past excursions to the soccer field.

“All right, pooper-scooper, let’s go!” I called as I strode down the hall. He emerged from the kitchen, piece of cold pizza in hand, while I was slipping on my sneakers.

“Uh-uh, put it back,” I said, pointing to the kitchen. “I’m not letting Mom and Dad chew me out because you couldn’t keep your paws out of the leftovers.”

“Aw, come on, Ky!”

“No. Eat an apple if you’re that hungry. Go, put it back.”

He groaned and dragged his feet back into the kitchen. I watched him return the pizza to its box and come back to the entryway before I opened the door and ushered him onto the driveway.

We have a two year old cat who goes out during the day and is in during the night, and she is very timid and fearful of new things. Recently, we adopted a stray kitten (about three or four months old) who we plan to keep in our at-home auto repair garage. We plan to let the kitten outside during the day once he's older, and we want to introduce the two before they meet up outside and either get into a fight or have one run away.

We have had the kitten (Rocko) in the house twice now, and both times our cat (Bean) has become very agitated, hissing and growling and eying him from hiding spots. Rocko is very laid-back and doesn't seem to mind Bean's hissing, but we haven't let the two get within several feet of each other. I don't want Bean to hurt Rocko out of fear if he approaches her, as she does have all of her claws and is a known biter.

How can we introduce the two without having at least one traumatised cat?

I love editing and would really like to get a job as an editor, but I don't know where to start. I'm going into my sophomore year of college this fall (English for secondary education...for now) and recognize that I still need some training as far as editing goes.

So, how did you get your editing job, and what advice do you have to give to a hopeful editor?

Thank you. :3

...the book is in the Religious/Christian fiction section? Or any fantasy books in the Religion section, for that matter.

I'm quite curious. I'm writing a novel about a demon that is turning out to be a rather Christian book (makes sense, I'm religious), but I know many Christians have a problem with fantasy in general, despite the undertones. The story is getting written either way, obviously, but I did have to wonder while I was working on it this morning.

I normally read fantasy, but thanks to the growing public interest in it, I've quickly grown bored of trying to find good books in the genre.

On the plus side, this means that I have developed an interest in scifi, which I previously had a serious thing against. I haven't read many books in the genre, as my friends don't read it and I don't know where to start.

The only scifi books I've read:

War of the Worlds by HG Wells (it was pretty good)

The Host by Stephenie Meyer (surprisingly good)

Childhood's End by Arthur C Clark (hated it)

The Space Trilogy by CS Lewis (loved it)

The Supernaturalist by Eoin Colfer (great book)

Maximum Ride Series by James Patterson (surprisingly good)

Uglies by Scott Westerfield (pretty good, have yet to finish the series)

Slaughter-House Five by Kurt Vonnegut (terrific book, though I hardly think it counts as scifi)

I'm also up for, er...I guess you could call it science fantasy, like Artemis Fowl. I'd love to read novels about people with superpowers or aliens. I don't really care what age group the books are in, but I'd rather read ones that aren't young adult, as I've had plenty of those recently.

Bonus question: I love Star Trek. Are the books worth it?

I'm looking for any books that:

--have an animal, werebeast, or animal shapeshifter as a main character(the animal can talk, but it doesn't have to),

--are not romance (but may have a romantic subplot),

--and promote nature and love as being more powerful and important than technology and society.

The book can be any genre (except the aforementioned Romance) in any age group from young adult (like Artemis Fowl) to adult, and the animals can be real or mythical. I also like manga, so feel free to suggest those, as well.

I like books like Novels of Redwall, White Fang, Watership Down, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Dragon Rider. (As far as manga go, I've read the first volume of +Anima.)

I very much disliked Blood and Chocolate, but only because of the ending.

By the way, Twilight doesn't count! I know one of you will want to suggest it...don't, please! I beg of you.

Thank you. :3

I found a site today about HHO kits that I could use to increase my gas mileage, which would be awesome as I've been planning to do a cross-country road trip for some time now. I don't know a whole lot about cars, but I know enough to be wary of putting foreign materials into my engine. The site claims that no alternations are made to my engine and the product can be removed and re-installed in a matter of minutes, and it also says that the steam produced would actually clean my engine. It sounds a bit too good to be true.

So, is this really safe? I love my car and will be paying the loan for another three years, so I certainly don't want it to develop any problems, especially since I have to drive to college every day.

I'm making mochi ice cream for my friend and I tomorrow, and the recipe I found calls for glutinous rice flour. My mum and I could only find regular rice flour, and the man at the store had never heard of glutinous rice flour (he said there is no gluten in rice).

I have found several different terms on the internet for rice flour, including mochiko, sweet rice flour, glutinous rice flour, and of course rice flour, but I've found nothing that states a distinction among them. When I looked up mochiko, I got each of the other names as a definition.

This is an excerpt from a story I recently began writing, and as I was skimming through it, I wondered if readers would be able to tell if the narrator was a boy or a girl (before I gave his or her name, of course). I've inserted a gender neutral name where the character's real name would be said. It's not that long, and you don't have to read the whole thing if you don't want to.

I'm not looking for critiques, as this is a rough first draft, but I'm not opposed to them if you really want to do so. Keep in mind that if it looks like a misspelling, it's because I use British spellings.

------------------------

The pencil snapped between my fingers. Sudden silence fell; I threw the broken pieces to the floor, ignoring the fact that shy little Mandy Blanc was beginning to cry and Jason Rigley looked as if he was about to crap himself. Imagine that. Me, the harmless weirdo who disappeared for a few months due to poor health, the kid that the popular girls tried to talk to because they wanted to look good by befriending the friendless, the straight A student who was called down to the counsellor when those A’s dropped to D’s, the “four-eyed“ bookworm--frightening the quarterback to the verge of bowel dysfunction.

“You all are idiots!” I was going crazy. This was it; I had finally snapped. “You have no idea what’s around you! Are you all blind? Are you all retarded? Idiots!”

Papers fluttered to the floor as I swept the books from my desk. I wanted to destroy things, rip things apart. There was no meaning to anything here, nothing in the school, the town, mattered. Football games, glee club, after school jobs, college--none of it meant anything. It was all just an illusion, and I was the only one in the whole damn building who understood--really understood--any of that.

“Jamie, please,” Miss Jameson gasped. What was she so afraid of? A skinny teenager with barely enough muscle to draw back a bow? I’d never used a gun. I’d nearly been killed countless times in the past few months. And yet, I was still the most dangerous person in the classroom, probably in the building, Jake Lane excluded, because I could see him hiding a machine gun in his locker if he could get his hands on one.

“This is stupid! It’s all pointless, can’t you see that?” I shouted. Obviously, no one was, but it was a little too late for me to pick up my books, sit down in my seat, and gesture for class to continue as if I wasn’t a maniac. Nope. My only option was to stand there screaming at my ignorant classmates like I was trying to be sent to a mental institution.

Miss Jameson was now backing toward the phone by the door. Soon the school security officer would be rushing to the classroom, calling into his walkie-talkie for the backup that was currently patrolling the perimeter of the high school campus. I’d be dragged out in handcuffs, shrieking nonsense to the world and flailing like a cat that’s been hugged by a toddler just a bit too long.

For the first time ever, I'm having trouble naming a character. I've been hunting around, but the kind of name I'm looking for isn't exactly easily found on baby names sites. The character is a girl and lives in a rather Kingdom-Hearts-Twilight-Town-esque city.

I am looking for strange and unusual names, perhaps something that is typically a word rather than a name, something that contains an X, or something Japanese. Something Kingdom Hearts-ish, you know?

Please and thank you. I'm totally brain dead here.

I saw it on TV a year or so ago. It was about a teenaged vampire who lived with his brothers. I think his older brother was gay and would kill his lovers, and his littlest brother was still in a stage where he would eat anything that came near him and so they kept him in the basement or something. The title was the name of the town they lived in. It was done like the main vampire was doing a film for class or something along those lines.

My friend let me borrow a disc to install a program on my computer. However, my laptop begins to read it and then stops. I even put in a CD to be sure my disc drive isn't broken, and it ran the CD just fine.

Any ideas how to fix this?