I've just posted a little something in the writer's gallery: it's my answer to this month's challenge...it's a bit dark though.

Oooh, this looks like fun!  And speaking of challenges, I just posted my answer to the April challenge.

Hopefully, I can do something with this: I'm still working on "Kindness to Animals" from...ugh...last year! 

Yeah, it's an extrapolation on that.  the "Ugly Shirt" isn't actually invisible at all and it doesn't impart invisibility; it's simply designed in such a way as to interact with recording equipment.  A lot of modern digital recording equipment has built-in edit functions that are triggered when particular patterns are picked up, and so particular things are essentially erased from digital memory.  It's my limited understanding that ugly shirts simply trigger an edit/splice function in digital recording equipment. As for the apparently Chinese/Taiwanese?  garment, it actually employs some kind of light-bending technology that essentially mimics its surroundings to the point at which whatever you're standing in front of appears on the front of your garment in a very hazy, indistinct, not very camouflaged way at all; the photos that were released of some guy wearing what looked like a baggy hoodie showed him standing on a city street, looking rather awkward and dorky, with the street behind him all hazy and blurry and not exactly proportional, on the front of his jacket an the jacket material itself made it look as if he was wearing something with the qualities of not-entirely-practical drapes and folds of Saran wrap.  It's like really baggy, kinda cheap and cheesy chameleon-wear that hasn't quite gotten the hang of the whole chameleon thing yet.  It's still in the earliest stages of the research phase, nowhere near practical development.  As for the "ugly shirt" I think I like it simply for the name. 

Did I mention the "ugly shirt" thing?  In William Gibson's novel, Spook Country, he describes a piece of clothing in a particular color (Klein Blue) which is virtually impossible to record on video--something about digital recording technology triggered to not record a particular group of pixels or something like that: basically the clothing, sometimes called an "ugly shirt" is something of a covert operations cloaking device (people see you when you're wearing it, but security cameras don't).  that's not what you were asking for or about, but still, it's an interesting tidbit.  (Of course, Gibson's "ugly shirt" is an extrapolation, based on the phenomenon of smart clothing, and apparently a reasonably good (as in not-awful) cloaking jacket has been developed and tested.  It doesn't exactly work, but it doesn't fail miserably either.

I love stuff like this: there's actually a technical word for that (and it's probably the least-interesting one around) but the word you're looking for, literally, is "cloaked."  It's a bit like the Klingon/Romulan cloaking devices in the Star Trek universe, which, to borrow on other elements of this thread make use of a "nobody-here-but-us-chickens field"...basically you don't become invisible so much as you're easy to overlook...

Wow!  Another great feature!  I really need to get back in the swing of things (I won't even say how much catching up I need to do!)  Thank you for including my shot here.  There's some super photography featured here--as always!  Congratulations to everyone featured.  Now I'm off to go catching up!

And since I'm really seriously catching up and have yet to finish past challenges, don't be surprised if it's "Kindness to animals that happen to be cats with shiny new toys in the cold."  or something...

I think I'm going to just combine topics from "Kindness to Animals" all the way through the upcoming challenge, especially since I'm feelin' that urge to write something.

Speaking of serialization.  One of the things I did was read Frank Herbert's original Dune...in it's novelized form.  I found out, later, that it had been serialized as well.  So, what I did was dig up references to the serialized version (which is the actual novel version with a few bits missing) and then I read the novel itself and tried to predict when a serial portion was coming to an end, without having actually read the complete serialization.  What I discovered was "rising action" with a prominent cliffhanger that wasn't really the cliff hanger I was expecting.  If you've got a loose thread or two, then you have an automatic cliff hanger, because you can "play it close to the vest" and simply resolve ONE cliff hanger in the next section.  There are so many ways of doing it though, and I guess the only real way to go about it is to be aware of your own story and the way you want to tell it; that right there is going to tell you how to serialize it.  Or you could to the Ray Bradbury "zip novel" format and simply compose a single serial novel out of only-vaguely-related self-contained short stories.  His greats, The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles are the best examples.  They're basically anthologies, but with the Illustrated Man, there is filler in between each individual story, threading them together.  In The Martian Chronicles, the whole "Epic Idea" of human life on Mars is the defining element.  For more coherent pieces, I'd maybe try the Frank Herbert approach or the Armisted Maupin "Tales of the City" approach--each chapter is a short story--or a combination of those two and/or any others you'd want.  The main thing, though, is just do it in a way that feels natural to both you and the story you're telling, because no matter what anybody says, you're actually the main authority. 

And by the way, Wolfenshire brings up and illustrates a really good point too.  He basically wrote a whole story in the comment above this one, and it can be serialized.  I had a distinct image and full story of him washing his car and getting squishy socks.  Writing Jack of Diamonds is the story arc, but the post-car-wash-squishy Wolfenshire was it's own distinct little tidbit, it's own distinct "Episode."

The whole thing with dialogue tags (and not using them) also depends on the story you're telling.  Generally, description in place of some dialogue tags deepens the story and pulls your reader in.  When you use dialogue tags too much, they break the emotional impact of the story, when you don't use them enough, you become confusing, but when you occasionally (even strategically) employ description, you're adding depth to the character and giving your reader a way to feel a bit of sympathy or antipathy for the person speaking; as a writer, the more you allow your readers engage with more than just the plot, the more likely you are to have devoted readers who are going to pay cash, or at least time for your other stuff.  But all of this ultimately boils down to what you're writing and what it requires, and so the only thing you really need to do is just follow the requirements of your own intentions.

I had no idea I was putting challenges out, but hey...if they're fun, run with 'em...the whole thing with writing is to actually have fun.  I mean, if you enjoy your story and have fun with it, then that's a sign that readers might do the same, and ultimately, that's what you want, especially if readers are paying money to do it.  The thing with dialogue tags is that they're sometimes unavoidable, but there are different dialogue tags, including morsels of description and also their absence.  If you're writing stuff in which characters are talking a lot to each other in long passages, sometimes it works perfectly to just set up the pattern with dialogue tags in the start and then dispense with them all together.  Harlan Ellison did quite a lot of that in his shorter works. 

Story lengths are like Abraham Lincoln's legs: they should be long enough to reach from the hips to the ground.

Also, genre determines story length: science fiction and fantasy stories tend to accept higher word counts for novels, though average is probably between 120,000 to 150,000 unless you're doing whompin' big Tolkein-esque or CJ Cherryh Russian literature length gonzo-huge-epics, where a whole book can be a "Prologue."  CJ Cherryh often breaks her major epics into bite sized pieces, turning them into trilogies and those even weirder "5-book-trilogies"...but that's simply because science fiction and fantasy stories tend to be stubborn and a lot larger than you think they're going to be.  They just don't leave you alone.  You're done writing your epic fantasy and suddenly, Princess Uvula steps forward and says: "By the way, did you know that the evil Queen Dyspepsia is actually my fairy-godmother, but she got into something of a tight-pickle with that low-life Prince Josephine who had issues with his parents for giving him that name?", and suddenly you've got Book 4 of what you thought was a trilogy, but books 1 - 3 have already been published and are recognized as a trilogy.  Now sf/f readers get to giggle at the idea that only in the fantastic fiction genres can you have a 5 book trilogy, which kinda also blows word counts out of the window.  All of this is to simply say that word counts are important, especially if you're writing to particular editorial specifications, but the only time to really worry about that is when you're deciding which market to sell to.  You should also keep in mind that it's also easier to sell novellas to the genre markets.  Mainstream fiction markets often limit themselves to short stories and novels with a big empty space in between, despite the huge number of mainstream novellas that once filled that market.

It is a matter of personal preference, and "said" or "says", are both equally valid, but just remember, that your use of dialogue tags has to match the tense in the rest of the story: if the story is in past tense, then you should only use "said"...and if the story is in present tense, then you should only use "says" though if you're writing about a past event in present tense, then you should slip into past perfect (when describing what someone HAD SAID) in the context of a character remembering something that had happened and is perfectly complete, or in terms of the story-teller dipping into the past in order to make some point with a lot of bearing on the present.  This is where a lot of writers tend to mess up, because in common speech (which often throws syntax and grammar our of window) it's acceptable (in informal situations) to mix tenses; in writing, this is a no-no, simply because it's cruelty to readers: mixed tenses are like blood clots in the arteries of the stories, they break the flow and often confuse readers, because story tenses, once established, actually become a part of the story.  Present tense writing is more intimate and immediate because the reader is given the feeling that the story is unfolding, real time, whereas past tense establishes that the story has already unfolded and there is some distance, both temporal and emotional, between you and what's written.  There's also a debate as to whether or not good writing should even include dialogue tags, since they're redundant in many ways.  I happen to think that they're necessary, but you don't always have to use the traditional ones.  Rather than say "he says" or "she said" you can also try describing the tone of voice--that "show-don't-tell" guideline.  Instead of writing: "It's over," she said.  You could go off in some other direction like: "It's over."  Her voice was like an ice pick, stabbing the silence.  Dialogue tags work well, though, especially when they're placed in unexpected (but logical places) or if they're consciously repeated in order to deliver a specific poetic cadence. 

Yeah, that's where writing gets fun (on another level) because each and every character you write is a potential main protagonist or main antagonist.  Just because they're in one story doesn't mean they're not going to come out and tap you on the shoulder and say, metaphorically, of course: "Hey you!  Write my story now."  If you have 5 characters in a story, that's 5 stories you can potentially write.  I love it when things like that happen.