John Smithers

9,965 reputation

2040

bio	website
	location
	age
visits	member for	2 years, 7 months
	seen	4 hours ago
stats	profile views	195

	9,965 reputation	bio	website		visits	member for	2 years, 7 months
2040 badges		location			seen	4 hours ago

summary answers questions tags badges favorites bounties reputation activity

373 Comments

suggestions reviews revisions comments badges posts accepts all

May 27	comment	Composing a single narrative by writing small chunks I do not have an answer for you, but I think you are overshooting your aim. These people are not stupid. They know how their forms look like, because they made it that way on purpose. So there is no need that it reads cohesively. Keep it short and interesting. You can tell your whole story if you have attracted their attention. Honestly, if you did X for five years at the beginning of your career and mostly have done Y and Z the following 15 years, do you really think that you are still such an expert in X that you have to tell them in detail about it? Or would be "done X for 5 years" enough?
May 4	comment	Tips For A Good Medieval Fantasy Novel @DavidAldridge: What's the difference?
Apr 19	comment	How do I create a book on iBookstore without having a Mac? Look closely at step 3 before jumping to step 4.
Apr 15	comment	Can a self publishing author use a Pen name/Pseudonym? @Vass, sure, you always can make a company (publisher in this case) and then publish via amazon. But I cannot tell you, what you have to consider in your country when you want to open a company.
Apr 10	comment	To translate a novel with Westerner's point of view I think we have an communication problem, @Des. Context, what is the context?
Apr 7	comment	To translate a novel with Westerner's point of view Ok, @Des, you have totally lost me. (Additional confusing, because the comments are merged now from your other question into this one). First: you tagged this question with "novel" and mentioning translating a "novel", but you say it is non-fiction and also tagged it with "technical writing". All in all highly confusing. Please specify as precisely as possible, what it is about that you want to translate. Give us more details. Answers to this kind of question depend heavily on context. And that's missing.
Apr 7	comment	Ways to improve your writing skills @Neil, it's magic and called "edit button" ;) Hint to OP: everything in angled brackets is interpreted as meta-data and not displayed.
Apr 6	comment	A more effective way of writing this dialogue: What do you mean with "the excerpt where I have to write this:"? Is that part of your translation?
Apr 2	comment	Ways to speed up my writing to 15 - 20 pages a day The answer depends on your slack time. E.g. you have 6 hours a day for writing, but effectively only use 4 hours. Then a strategy for motivating you using the other 2 hours is most promising. If you only have 3 hours a day and write 3 hours, it's getting more complicated.
Mar 31	comment	For Kindle, are hard paragraph breaks that serious? Hm, why should hard-breaks be a problem? That sounds weird. Maybe the real problem is the text indentation of the new paragraph. Soft-breaks are normally done with Shift+Return.
Mar 27	comment	Is it acceptable practice to use contractions in a fictional first person narrative for children? May I suggest that you provide an example with and without contractions, so we all know what you are talking about?
Mar 21	comment	Writing competitions Yes, there are.
Mar 8	comment	How should we go from Stack Exchange Q/A to publishable PDF with the least hassle? johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc - github.com/walle/gimli
Mar 6	comment	How much power does the author have over an original work? Some day I will write an essay about the power of commas. Obviously not this day. Thanks, @JohnM.Landsberg. BTW, you can edit the post yourself.
Mar 2	comment	Does submitting multiple pieces to professional magazines (and being turned down) hurt chances of later stories that may be better-written? They would need a whole IT department just for maintaining that "connotation" database. Can you imagine how many stories these people reject each day? Do you really think they bother to store and maintain these rejection? Don't you think they have better things to do? No one puts you on a black list. Well, at least as long as you do not threat them ;)
Feb 28	comment	How should I format a non fiction book with Scrivener? @Lauren: Obliquely? Me? I can negate that, because I've never encountered that adverb before ;) And why don't you answer: Use InDesign?
Feb 25	comment	How to minimize language mistakes while writing Striving for perfection is the road to hell. You never ship, you always "improve".
Feb 22	comment	Writing from the middle Before you know that you are starting "in the middle", you need to have an idea of the beginning and the end (otherwise how should you know that it is the middle and not the end?). Depending on how do you know beginning and ending, you maybe can take your opening (which is the beginning) and the middle part (as new ending) and try to write the middle part of these two. Sounds weird? Well... The hardest part of the job is fooling yourself into writing.
Feb 7	comment	Describe all corrections as clearly and unambiguously as possible My I ask why you don't ask your editor?
Feb 7	comment	Do script readers start at the beginning? Why should they do that? If the beginning is crap, then there is no hope for the middle part. If you are not hooked at the beginning, no-one will read/watch till the middle.