As long as you leave out the "invariably" I'm happy. :) I think maybe underwriters are less common than overwriters, but I've certainly run into both. And even with underwritten prose, just about every writer has a list of little weasley words that sneak in there when they aren't looking. "Well" is top of my list. Just because I overuse it, doesn't mean my characters will all talk like that. Bleh! I usually end out taking out at least two or three per page.

Um, further warning to anyone to whom this has happenned. It can be a sign that you have a tendancy to overanalyze what you are doing, and need to find better ways of letting your backbrain do the writing instead of your forebrain. Seriously. It never happens to me. When I'm tired my writing goes downhill. :(

I like them both. I get story ideas more often from movies than from books, I think because translating things from one media to another is a way for me to absorb and change it and make it my own. If I see something I really like in a book, it's harder for me to use it in a different book without copying, than it is when I see something I really like in a movie. But although i like them both, I do think they are different. I think pictures are a faster media, as they dial directly into the brain without going through the linguistic centers first, but that words are a more flexible media, and mostly because of that same translation process, words are more intimate. People are much more prone to talk about books that changed their lives, than they are to talk about paintings that changed their lives. :) For really good attention grabbing effect, you generally want words AND pictures. Ask the advertising industry. Ask newspaper editors. Ask people who do magazines. Both is better. :)

The ultimate answer on this capitalizing nouns ending in s is... There is no official right answer to this question. Be consistant, because that will make it easier for your copyeditor to change it to whatever that publishing house standard is, after you sell it. If you aren't planning to sell it, do whatever looks/sounds good to you.

"I'd like this movie/game, even though this reviewer didn't" Oh, I do that all the time. I used to figure that when ever the reviewers in Locus magazine got condescending "if all you are looking for in a book is a plot that moves well, this book might satisfy you, BUT..." that meant I would probably like the book, and anything they raved over I probably wouldn't like. Too much emphasis on "literary" quality, and not darned near enough on good stories, for my taste, some of them reviewers.

Yeah, but I object strongly to the "invariably" in the original quote because it happens not to be true. I know lots of writers, even published ones, who underwrite the first draft. Personally, I tend to leave out descriptions on the first pass, and so on the second pass when I take out the excess words, I also add descriptions, and the end result tends to be about the same length as the first draft. This isn't to say that learning to "omit needless words" isn't a good idea, just that it isn't always what is needed.

Personally, I didn't know we had spare time. I think someone must have stolen mine... ...okay, so not really. I've been under the weather, and so the temptation to play the Sims expansion (Makin' Magic) my husband got me for my birthday has actually been overpowering my more usual pasttimes. Every so often my collection of freestuff downloads calls to me, "do something with us! make cool images!" but right now it's pretty ignorable which is a strong indication that I'm not healthy again yet. Not that I ever seem to get as far as the "make cool images" part. I love playing around with the 3D graphic toys, but there just isn't any strong motivation to finish things, so I hop from project to project without ever completing anything, just like I used to do with my writing way back in Jr/Sr High School. (The Eyes of Infistar --> 11866 words since February 17th)

Trying to figure out who's who, hunh? Well, if it helps, I wander by every once in a while, make doldrumy and/or snarky comments suitable to a vetran wannabe, and then wander off again. I've got six children, have two pro sales of short stuff, (one fiction, one non-), and primarily write fantasy (although the next book on my to write queue is space opera.) Nice to meetcha!

I've got one that's just horrible for that kind of thing, I'm afriad. Introduction of the Principal Soloist To me had fallen the delicate task of informing the new Eplakil of his recent elevation. So when news arrived at the palace that his ship, the Borgo T'el, had docked at the nearby village of Foltoui, I set out at once to find him. When I emerged from the stifling dimness under the jungle canopy, the fierce sunlight revealed more than one ship bobbing about on the bright waters. I was not experienced in the ways of trading vessels, so I decended to the village, passing through the thornwall, and stopped to make inquiries. The first likely informant I found was an elder, engaged in mending the end of a rope. "Isde Ikhsior?" the old man responded, showing his nut-stained teeth. He seemed amused. "So Ikhsior rates as high now. That's appropriate," he set his rope aside, levered himself to his feet, and, as he was an elder, I carefully refrained from noticing the overly energetic way he brushed bits of treebark off the seat of his green cotton gisgir. "I'll take you to the Bedime of the Borgo T'el," he said. Everytime I try removing some of the "wierd words" I end up putting in different wierd words. [sigh!]

Hardly anyone lets you send in a whole ms anymore. [grump!] So mostly it's just partials and outlines and so forth that get sent back, and I can never reuse them because I always discover some mistake that needs correcting while I'm checking to make sure the ms. didn't get dirty. :( People don't loose nearly anything resembling 50% of my submissions though. More like one in six or seven. And a couple of those have been later found and returned, so I think it's more on the order of one in ten irrevocably lost.

Some fantasy authors go one step further (J.R.R. Tolkien being a famous example) and create their own languages, and then name things in those. For my novel Cantata in Coral and Ivory I needed a lot of linguistic elements and I didn't want to go to the work of inventing several inter-related languages, so I used real world languages to provide my vocabulary, and then sent everything through a sound switching routine that made everything sound very foriegn, but still retained the relationships of the real languages they were based on. When I submitted my tutorials I just uploaded HTML versions, in the requisite forms, and then waited for the okay. But then I've been handcoding web pages for years. I don't think it's any different if you upload text versions though.

I learned to read very young. I remember reading fairy tales in kindergarten. I do not remember my first book, or my first adult book. I remember the first "big kids book" I got out of the school library. It was Tarzan of the Apes. I count my first "story" (definately not the first thing I've written, nor the first thing I finished that wasn't a school assignment, because I never finished it, but it's a first anyway, because it was the one that made me figure out that I liked writing stories), as "The Young Warriors" technically a Star Wars fanfic, written when I was about 12. I've started typing it up, and what I've transcribed so far is posted on my webpage.

Nowadays I mostly just send a small SASE to hold the rejetion letter. It's easier, and most of the publishing houses seem to prefer it. I understand that with novels a phone call is the usual way to convey acceptances, but a yes via mail fits in the envelope just as easily as a no. (One editor admits that she gets a kick out of phoning new authors with acceptances, and the ones that appear to take it all in stride and sound calm are very dissapointing to her.) I just submitted something via email. That was a first for me, I think it's easier to show professionalism with a paper submission. But the editor asked to get it that way, after the first submission was lost.

millman, what you write may possibly be drek. Or Crescent points out, it may not be. But if even if it is drek, most writers find it possible to improve what has been written after the fact, in a little process known as revision. If you don't keep what you write, you don't give yourself a chance to fix it. Save that stuff. Come back to it later and look at it again. I don't see how it can hurt, and you may surprise yourself. Because you have endured really horrible stuff, you have a great capacity to deliver hope to other people in similar situations. There doesn't seem to be many things as helpful to people undergoing great and ongoing trials, as knowing that someone else has seen troubles equally horrible, and survived. What you are writing may seem terribly depressing and whiny to you, but it probably isn't anywhere near as useless as you seem to think.

I never throw anything away. I not only have everything I wrote in highschool, but I have everything I wrote in Jr. High as well, pretty much. I even started dumping my "first" story onto my webpage, spelling errors and all. (This would be the first story I tried to write down on paper for the sake of writing down on paper that was not a school assignment, and was not a retelling of someone else's story. I was about eleven at the time.) Although I haven't got very far with it, I rather enjoy typing it up. It's nice to see all the problems I don't have anymore. :) But I know lots and lots and lots and lots of writers that seem to do exactly what you are doing. They write, they think it stinks and they delete it. This is known in the trade as having an overactive internal editor. (I, on the other hand, have a disfunctional internal editor, opposite end of the scale problem.) There are ways of tricking your internal editor into turning itself off. Try repeating to yourself, whichever of the following mantras best fits your motivations. #1 - I am simply writing as a form of therapy. Keeping this stuff for a year so I can read it again after time has passed is part of that therapy. #2 - This is just a practise novel I am writing so that I can practise doing endings. In order to practise endings, I don't have to write a GOOD novel, I just have to GET to the END. #3 - Experts say you need to write a million words of drek before you can start writing the good stuff. This short story will be drek words 101500 to 104000. #4 - It doesn't matter if it stinks because I can always submitt it under an assumed name. If none of these fit, try making up your own. Other techniques that are supposed to help are: Typing with your screen turned off. If you can't see what your typing, you can't know that it stinks. (Really good for people who can't ever finish anything because they keep seeing all the errors they made in the stuff they just finished typing and so they go back and twiddle, and twiddle some more....) Using an outrageous font in some strange color (Megenta Uethi Gothic, Yes!), so that your editor is clued into the fact that this is "NOT to be taken SERIOUSLY" Set yourself high wordage quotas, and really, really try and achieve them. (If you still have this problem next November try joining the National Novel Writing Month challenge. dialyn usually helpfully posts a link.) The idea is to force yourself to write so fast that of course it's drek. Doesn't matter. Don't have to write good, just have to get words. Write longhand. It takes more effort to destroy hand written pages than it does to simply fail to save a wordprocessing file. People with overactive internal editors are frequently surprised at how not horrible what they wrote, assuring themselves it was horrible drek all the while, actually ended up being when they came back to it after a suitable cooling period. Personally, I need a cooling period in order to see anything wrong with my stuff. :(