Davirk

I'm writing a story about kids in space, and there's this girl who's a robot in a human body, and she goes to school with this mean girl named Ines who tries to kill her a few times, and she really likes this cute girl named Sun but she's afraid that people will hate her because she's a robot in a human body, and there's adventures, and war games, and blah blah blah and in the end they have to kill a maniac Dutch woman. Anyway, I think my plot's probably the best one to be conceived since they invented the Persona series, but I'm going to ask you what you think about it and get very upset if you say anything less than glowing praise of my extremely vague outline.

I get that this is an unrealistic simulation, considering that I have character names /and/ a list of things that happen /and/ my protagonist isn't nearly speshul enough /and/ her love interest isn't borderline abusive. Gomen.

Writing a novel? series? undecided. The current project takes place in a school for the gifted in military matters that I only realized after the fact was a subconscious ripoff of Battle School, but my book has transhumanist themes and lesbians where Card had religious imagery and casual sexism so I'm probably still doing okay. That's not what I'm here to ask about.

There are precisely sixty children in this school, and they stay (mostly) constant throughout the years and years of schooling. Even if the project winds up being a novel, it will be an extremely long novel. It occurred to me, early in drafting stages, that it would be a fairly good idea to plot out all the children in the school. Not even a chapter's worth of backstory, but a quick "where do they come from and what can they do" plus physical descriptions, names, and occasional motivations/plot advancing hooks.) This is a good idea, obviously, in adding verisimilitude to my story world, fleshing out the setting of the world, bruteforcing enough character generation that I can get secondary characters the readers and I can actually tolerate, et cetera. The reader will almost certainly not experience all these characters firsthand. If their names are mentioned, it'll be just that- a mention. But making characters is hard. Am I expending unnecessary effort here that I should be spending on other parts of the story? Card left most of his schoolchildren unnamed, but Rowling has notes on them all, leaving me conflicted

Or is that just a thing that the amateur authors around here lately think and I'm availability heuristicing the heck out of this?

I know that we do have /some/ orphanages, technically, and that they're fairly common outside the First World, but I doubt most of these stories are set in industrial China. Weirdly enough, none of them seem to be set in pre-modern Europe or America either.

I'm writing a science-fiction novel and I don't actually have the grasp on mathematics to see if this could happen. The society in my book needs to blow up Fomalhaut b at least but preferably Fomalhaut in its entirety (this is a real exoplanet and a real star, you can wikipedia them for stats). They're extremely industrialized and post-scarcity, so assume that they have ample supplies of metal (but probably not enough to build the Death Star). The only superscience thing they have are gates which link two places in space together. They can scale up as far as one needs, but the resulting gate apparatus has to get correspondingly bigger. That said, they break Conservation of Energy and allow for the creation of energy (and, by consequence, the reduction of entropy in a closed system). So, basically, they have as much energy as they could want.

From what I understand, a Jupiter-sized exoplanet is already basically undestroyable using the techniques in the setting, let alone a star. The only thing I can think of that would break a planet that big is crashing it into a sun, and the only thing I can think of that can destroy a star is crashing it into a black hole (or waiting until it puts itself out) But, again, I don't have a strong grip on the mathematics or accompanying theory, and if anyone would know how to blow up the sun it's probably physicists.

If not, how do you explain both the phenomenon of being unable to write and the phenomenon of people claiming that they've been taken over by the spirit of writer's block and are thus unable to write? I have no strong opinion either way (I've never experienced such an episode, and I've been writing for fourish years now so you'd think I was due for one, but who knows, maybe I'm special, n=1 is not going to get anything published) and was interested in other people's perspective on the issue.

There are SO MANY questions about point of view, and. It just boggles the mind. I know I'd have to think long and hard before doing anything other than third person limited because that's my preferred style, probably because I've read many good books written in third person limited that are in my genre. Maybe you don't have a strong preference, which is kind of strange to think of, but in that case then at least the story should suggest in what point of view to write.

Is it just stalling so you don't have to begin writing (like the deal with names or titles), only more valid because while you can name your book My Book and protagonist Protag O'Nist and then change them later, you actually can't use a placeholder point of view? Is there some subtle intrincity of point of view I don't understand (maybe I was supposed to go on a vision quest for my point of view instead of borrowing Ender's Game's). Is there some point-of-view revolution in YA novels I wouldn't know because I don't read YA?

Bonus Question: Who said writing multiple first-person point of view was okay, and where's their address so I can mail them a sternly-worded letter? It might have worked fine for The Animorphs but that doesn't mean you can do that now. What caused this revolutionary (read, nauseating) new point of view

Writing sci fi. Space habitats. Where do we get the nitrogen that we need to live from if not the earth (I've don't remember other atmospheres having nitrogen in them).

Okay, some spambot or virtual sweatshop, but what the hell does he have to /gain/ from it? I've been to the site, I made an acount with a disposable email, and I honestly have no idea what I'm supposed to be scammed into here. It's not commercial, it's basically just a hosting site for classic literature. Anyone have a horror story about how they lost their job because of a horrible virus they got from alaknas or w/e?

Not that I like reading books where cliches come in like a hurricane, of course. I just don't understand why the aspiring authors on this board are always asking what thing is less cliche, as if that's going to make their book the next Harry Potter. They have this thing where they have to avoid cliches like the plague, where really it's the story that's important. Most story tropes are older than dirt- Shakespeare did everything first, after all. So where'd the idea pop into these kid's heads that they need to write a story without any cliches and then suddenly they will have written the greatest book of all time? My personal favorite story of all time is Hamlet, otherwise known as "that story Shakespeare basically plagerized, number 45", but it's still alive and kicking hundreds of years later. This is because Shakespeare's, well, Shakespeare, and even though this story's been done before he did it far better than anyone else did. So, I guess the point of this is: weird B&A children, embrace the cliches. Remember that there's nothing new under the sun.

I mean don't go overboard like I just did but don't be afraid to include, say, an elf when that's a total fantasy cliche. Or elemental powers. Or more basic cliches, like "being set on Earth and populated by characters who are humanoid in thought and in form".

Obviously it doesn't matter terribly because I'll do what I want regardless, but I'm curious as to if this has it's own name or something. I write in the third person, and it's certainly not third person omniscient- the vast majority of the character's thoughts are private from the viewers. However, you can see into the thoughts of two (maybe three but I'm not entirely decided) characters. One's an AI implanted in the other's body so usually it doesn't stretch the narrative too much since they're in the same place at the same time, but you can see what happens to one even when the other's unconscious or away and read both of their takes on situations. Is this just third person limited, and it's not actually specific to one character, is this just third person omniscient with a lot of information left out, or is it something else altogether?

Obviously, sites like Wattpad or fictionpress or deviantart or any of the other great online literature depositories have a very, very low barrier to entry. I mean, literal monkies could probably do it. I want something a little bit more classy. I want a site where I can post something I've written, rewritten, and editted so many times my head spins without it being drowned in YET ANOTHER crappy anime incest fanfic. I want a site where the quality of the work is moderated at least a tiny bit so that I can browse the works there and know that they are at worst mediocre. In short, I want a curated site. Does such a site exist?

Obviously, the Sol system has a lot of asteroids. Like. A lot. Billions. But, we also have eight planets, when most stars with known exoplanets only have one or two. That being said, are large amounts of asteroids common to most solar system or is this another way in which Sol deviates from the norm?

BQ: I know that it's really, really hard to conclusively decide whether or not a particular star has any planets at all, let alone their composition or anything else about them. But based on solar system formation models, how many terrestrial planets are each star expected to have, on average?

The whole dystopian genre was kind of kickstarted by George Orwell's 1984. It wasn't intended primarily as a pleasant fictional novel, but as a work attacking the principles behind the USSR and was basically the book equivalent of a man standing on the corner and screaming "RUSSIA IS MESSED UP". This sparked a wave of novels that did the same thing with other human vices, like Brave New World with hedonism and Fahrenheit 451 with anti-intellectualism.The characters of these works all got bad endings- dead, with the government still in power and unlikely to ever change.

Flash forward a couple decades, and we have The Hunger Games.The setting of The Hunger Games was crap, there's no denying that. There's constant despair and a hilarious level of pay inequity. But that's where things start going weird.The Hunger Games is, in part, a romance. While there were romantic plotlines in all three of the other books, 1984 was not filled with pages of Julia bashfully stealing a glance of Winston's sleeping form, or whatever. Furthermore (spoilers), Katniss wins. The government topples and she and her family live in peace. While victory was costly, it was possible unlike in the other works. The Hunger Games is just the near-future version of the classic tale of the chosen hero slaying the evil king.

The Hunger Games sparked a wave of copycats that are called dystopian without even lip service to the classics that created that label. That said, what is the new meaning of "dystopia"?

They're in Hindu mythology I think?

I know that's not actually a question. Regardless. I'm planning on at least sort of attempting to teach myself Dutch in preparation for a hypothetical future emigration or extended visit to Western Europe, probably Belgium. Dutch, being a somewhat "useless" and rarely-spoken language outside of the Netherlands and Flanders, doesn't really have a derth of information availible on the internet in readily-accessable forms, the way lots of more popular languages do. So. I need "how to Dutch" on the internet websites. Free is preferable, but if it's really good I am willing to drop some money on it (although I'm sort of broke and can't afford a whole lot)

Cursory look into what's required to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria and to medically and legally transition gender. Apparently, you have to live as a member of your desired sex for a year before at least some medical procedures become available to you. I was about to express frustration at how unbelievably stupid that is before I realized I don't really understand what that entails. What do they mean when they say that? I can't imagine I'll live my life altogether too much differently once I'm out. Is it just insisting on the proper pronouns or is there a gender-role related component to it? I'm honestly a little concerned because I still have some masculine affinities and interests (geopolitics, pants, other things) and I've worked myself into a paranoid lather thinking that this is going to impede my transition.

I've heard it mentioned as dystopian in the same breathe as The Hunger Games. Judging by that, and by the fact that the movie posters are all resplendent with pictures of attractive teenagers, I've assumed that it's not really dystopian in nature and instead mainly chronicles the efforts of a group of teenagers to destabilize their oppressive government. But that's all I know about it. I don't need a plot summery so much as I need a description of the setting.

There's a couple guys in the LGBT section who like to post deliberately inflamatory stuff to get reactions. You know. Trolls. Stuff that the people of the board probably hear quite enough of in their daily life as it stands. Can this individuals get kicked off the site for being intolerable bigots, and if so, how would I go about doing that?