JSBձոգչ

4,592 reputation

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bio	website	jsbangs.com
	location	United States
	age	31
visits	member for	2 years, 6 months
	seen	May 15 at 19:01
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I have a degree in Linguistics, but I work as a programmer. Most of my expertise about English is self-taught, plus lots of random trivia I've acquired here and there.

This is my favorite EL&U comment ever:

This isn't really a question about English so much as a question about hugs. Source

	4,592 reputation	bio	website	jsbangs.com	visits	member for	2 years, 6 months
1031 badges		location	United States		seen	May 15 at 19:01

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May 15	comment	How many words in 350 pages typed and double spaced? @Jed, there are lots of examples of long first epic fantasy novels, for sure. But I wouldn't want the OP to think that he should try to send in a 300K monster on his first shot.
May 14	comment	How many words in 350 pages typed and double spaced? You've correctly identified the wordcount for epic works from established authors. However, I've been told many times that first books should generally shoot for about 100K words, and that anything over 120K is a hard sell.
Apr 11	comment	Can a self publishing author use a Pen name/Pseudonym? The name an your Amazon account should be your real name. However, you can put anything you want as the "author name". Amazon will show the author name to people on the site, but it'll write the checks to you.
Mar 29	comment	Is it acceptable practice to use contractions in a fictional first person narrative for children? @LaurenIpsum, in spoken language children learn to say the contracted don't before they say do not. I was never aware of this convention with early reader books, but I suspect that it's in place more to avoid having to teach the apostrophe at that young age.
Mar 27	comment	Is it acceptable practice to use contractions in a fictional first person narrative for children? I'm curious: what made you think you shouldn't use contractions? The only writing styles which don't use contractions are extremely formal styles such as academic non-fiction. All fiction writing uses contractions extensively.
Feb 13	comment	Is it true that men (in general) can't write female first-person? I've written first-person stories with female narrators. A pregnant female narrator to boot. It's not that hard.
Jan 31	comment	My Ex husband's wife self published a non fiction book naming my kids in the story IANAL, but unless the work is actually slanderous, there's no legal recourse against somebody else using your children's names.
Jan 20	comment	How to tell a story with the least amount of writing? @Aerovistae, the phrase le mot juste has been borrowed into English. It doesn't necessarily indicate bilingualism. (Though Lauren would have to tell you if she actually is bilingual.)
Jan 20	comment	How to tell a story with the least amount of writing? I hate to be an ass, but if you don't like writing, maybe you shouldn't try to be a writer.
Jan 9	comment	Punctuation-Quote or Quote-Punctuation? @SF. And rightly so. I hope you weren't offering this as a reason to keep the question open.
Dec 19	comment	Can I self-publish, and how much would it cost? Borders and the other big box booksellers are generally unwilling to take indie press or self-published books, and there's basically nothing that you can do about it. There is no self-publishing service that can really get you into those stores, and any service claiming otherwise is probably a scam.
Dec 16	comment	Is it a bad writing practice to start sentences with a verb? @Mussri, correcting "sentences" to "phrases" makes your statement less accurate, not more, unless you're using "phrase" in a non-standard way. There are noun phrases (which begin with a noun), but also verb phrases (which begin with a verb) and prepositional phrases (which begin with a preposition), and many other types to boot. Your clarification that English is SVO is correct, but that leaves out a lot of things, especially the fact that the S does not have to be a noun.
Nov 19	comment	What does active voice mean? @Satanicpuppy I really wish we could put to death the notion that the passive voice is "wishy-washy" or "weak". Sometimes the passive voice is exactly what you need, and generations of newbie writers have been led astray by the false idea that you should avoid the passive for some reason.
Oct 27	comment	Adding Detail/“Filling” the story Related: writers.stackexchange.com/questions/1044/… writers.stackexchange.com/questions/3637/how-to-create-space/…
Oct 22	comment	Is an anthology a valid NaNoWriMo entry? My NaNoWriMo this year is just a set of short stories. Not even an anthology... just some stories I want to write. It's more important that you do it than that you obey the rules.
Sep 26	comment	Which well-established vanity publishers offer publishing for money and how much money is enough? Also, no big-name publishers with established distribution networks will simply publish books for money. That's what makes them different from vanity presses: they have to maintain some kind of reputation for quality, and the only way to be published by them is through an editor.
Sep 26	comment	Which well-established vanity publishers offer publishing for money and how much money is enough? I don't have time for a full response right now, but no reasonable amount of money can buy widespread distribution. You can pay for editing, cover design, printing, etc., but getting your book into the big box stores requires a distribution network, and that's not something you can just buy.
Aug 12	comment	What's the significance of ancient mythology in literature? Is this a writing question? It seems to me that this is more of a literary criticism question.
Aug 10	comment	Writing a novel which has the same structure and a particular theme in each chapter Something very similar to this structure was used in Ekaterina Sedia's The Secret History of Moscow, so it can be done in published works. However, I hated that book, and hated the repetitiveness of the structure, so YMMV.
Jul 27	comment	IF i want to write an episode to a TV sitcom, how can i send it to the TV network? Well, your first problem is that Beavis and Butthead hasn't been on the air for over a decade.