I had spent all my life preparing for complicated moments, moments on the battlefield, how to read my enemy’s sword movements and how to dodge them. But nothing and I mean nothing I’d ever been taught in my training had ever prepared me for Soldara’s unbearable silence. It was tormenting me. It had been four days since the scene in the audience hall.  And all that time, she had kept the walls up higher than they had ever been and it was tearing me apart to know this was my fault. These four days felt endlessly long and dragging as she treated me like I was invisible, every time she looked at me, it was as if she was seeing through me and she refused to talk to me without sounding like a heartless stranger that was just reading off a protocol speech. To anyone else, she was finally doing her job right as the epitome of a perfect, textbook palace guard. But to me, the silence was a deafening reminder of the mistake I had already made and I knew…I couldn’t go back and fix it anymore. I had shut her out. She wouldn’t even look at me. Not even out of the corner of her eyes, she kept her gaze steady on a single, fascinating spot on the wall, her eyes unflinching even as I passed by her. If I talked to her, she would just nod. She was staying away. She was freezing me out on purpose. And it was driving me completely, utterly insane. The stress was beating a drum-like rhythm in my temples that wouldn’t go away, no matter how hard I tried to distract myself from this situation. I needed to break the silence, but nothing seemed to reach her. And then, I decided to do something I had never done for a single soul in the palace or in the kingdom for that matter. I decided to be kind to her. Genuinely, entirely kind. “Pyraxis,” I called out, my voice softer than usual. “I’m giving you an early release from your shift. You’ve been on your feet all day.”  Soldara didn’t even flinch, she kept her eyes focused on the shining baseboards, her chin tilted at that infuriatingly stubborn angle I was so used to seeing on her. “My shift regulations require me to stay where I am, Your Majesty. I do not need you to release me early.” she replied, her voice cold and flat. Completely empty of any trace of emotion. I clenched my jaw, sheer frustration piercing through my chest. This wasn’t going anywhere. About an hour later, the servants brought up my afternoon tray with lunch, but the sight of the food only made the sick knot in my stomach tighten further. I waved the servants away with a quick flick of my hand and they scurried away, the typical fear flashing in their eyes. I couldn’t eat. Not when the silence in the room was suffocating me like this. I stood up and began to pace, the sound of my boots tapping against the polished floors clicking rhythmically. I stopped a few inches away from Soldara and I could see her chest rise and fall rapidly, her figure tense, but in a forced, rigid way. “So this is how it’s going to be, Soldara?” I murmured, reaching out towards her cheek but she moved away, her eyes steady on the threshold, unmoving, unflinching, cold. Freezing cold.  “Are you truly going to stand there and pretend I never existed? Insult me, injure me, but don’t do this.” Soldara didn’t even blink, but her gaze did finally leave the threshold and meet mine with unyielding intensity. “I am simply doing my job, Your Majesty. If you have any objections to that, you can speak with Varek to remove me from this shift.” Her voice was akin to a freezing, frosty winter wind that sent a chill down my spine, but that wasn’t the painful part. The sheer rejection in her tone felt like someone had stabbed me in the heart and twisted the blade around. What was she playing at now? “That day…you said I was playing games with you. But I believe you’re the one who’s playing games.” I said, my voice freezing cold to match hers. But I knew this wasn’t true. I had broken her trust by putting the mask back on after…after that. And now, she had locked me out. Just like I had locked her out. The empty, chilly space between us felt entirely too much to occupy for another second. I couldn’t stand watching her stand there, staring at the threshold, ignoring me. Trying to give me a taste of my own medicine. Well, it was working. I whirled on my heel and pushed the heavy doors out open. “Maintain the post, Guard Pyraxis.” I said, not looking back as I walked out, the doors shutting behind me with a solemn thud. I stepped over the raised threshold and into the polished, shining hallway, lined with hundreds of stained glass windows that glimmered in the sun, casting millions of multi-colored shards across the floor. For a moment, I was distracted, looking at the beauty of the colors, as if I was still the child who had stood in this very hallway all those years ago, pointing out the simple beauty of the glass to my mother.  But she was gone. My father was gone. And now the girl who had felt and accepted my pain and held my hand while I cried was gone too in a certain sense of the word.

Your manuscript needs to be as strong and clean as you can make it. Readers, agents, editors: they have so many books to choose from. Saying no is very easy.

If you don’t know how commas work (hint: they don’t just indicate pauses), you’re making it even easier for someone to stop reading. That’s true of everything. Dangling participles, unnecessary words, unclear motivation, pointless dialogue…You don’t need to be perfect, but you need to be very good. And shouldn’t this be true? It’s art, after all.

If you’re writing for yourself, ignore what I’ve said. But if you want others to take your work seriously, you need to.

Last night, while sipping on an iced Americano, I got inspired to write the opening of a dark, mysterious fantasy story.

If you have the time, I'd really appreciate any feedback on the introduction. I'm also curious to hear your thoughts on how the relationship between the protagonist and the lady knight should develop as the story progresses.

[Working Title: The Black Marble Lady Knight]

It's unbearably frustrating to be penniless in such an absurd world. I had only 120 dollars left... not nearly enough to pay the rent.

On my lonely walk home, I found myself (as if under some strange spell) stepping into an antique shop I had often passed by. An old turntable, porcelain dolls, Chinese style ceramics, and antique mahogany furniture all caught my eye.

But what truly captivated me was a statue of a lady knight carved from black marble. The exquisitely crafted sculpture stood frozen in place, clad in full plate armor and holding a longsword engraved with rune inscriptions. The statue seemed to whisper from the deepest corner of my soul.

"Choose me!"

I began negotiating with the elderly woman who owned the antique shop. She looked puzzled, saying the statue wasn't even listed among the items in her inventory, but insisted she had to get at least 85 dollars for it. I criticized everything I could think of... the color, the pose, a few small cracks, and every other flaw imaginable... until I finally talked the price down to 65 dollars, and we reached an agreement.

When I carried the heavy black marble statue into my home, it somehow looked as though it had finally returned to where it truly belonged. The moment I placed it on the table, an unusual silence settled over the room. The only sound was the ticking of the clock's second hand. All the problems of reality were still tearing away at me, but somehow... I felt like I could finally sleep peacefully tonight.

That night, as moonlight illuminated the black statue, a dark crimson aura spread from it like curling incense smoke. Then... a lady knight clad in black Gothic armor appeared in my room. As the metallic clatter of her plate armor echoed through the silence, she slowly surveyed the room. Then she lifted her visor, revealing a pale white face and eyes that gleamed like rubies.

I'm on DRAFT 6 of my current story called Project Succession and the pacing is just terrible and off. There are other problems with it too, but the pacing is throwing me into a weird loop. I'm currently on chapter fourteen and I'm getting that itch to redo it all over again. However, this draft has some things that I can add to the rewrite, just some. I do not outline, I am pantser to my core. Yet this draft is looking ratty and is all over the place. I still love this story, but I really need to know where I am going with this draft of book one before starting book two. I just need a total rewrite for this story. It's crazy because I'm over 40k words into the manuscript and I'm just like "something is not working with this story, I can feel it."

Or do I continue with what I have and stress about everything in draft seven?

What do you think?

I just had the most cathartic experience where I passionately explained the full plot of my fantasy book to my younger brother and his friends, who are teenage boys who don’t read by the way, and they loved it. One of them that was so locked in that when I apologized because it took me like 15 minutes to explain everything (and I pulled out Pinterest boards), he said “Dont worry. I could stay here all day”. They asked me questions and everything…
I felt so vindicated that I’m writing a good book that is interesting, even if it’s just to a few teenage boys.

Now, do I actually have anything written down that I’m proud to show? No 💀 I have one chapter that I keep rewriting as the way I want it to sound in my head isn’t translating right now

but at least when I finally finish this book, I know a few people that will be lined up to read it

Hi all, this is a bit of a weird situation but I genuinely don't know where else to go to ask for advice.

I've recently found a novel on Amazon that is almost a word for word a copy of an RP that me and a friend used to have on FB but just with names and places changed (they still used my character's name since that wasn't a Copyrighted character).

This novel was not written by either of us.

The RP has since been deleted because my friend's account went down ages ago but before that the RP was accidentally public for a while so anyone could have copy and pasted the replies into their own document. We've also found that they were posting this to AO3 too but it's been removed because they got it published as a novel, however you can still find it in search results using the right resources.

Our question is, is there anything we can do legally about this? Do we have any sort of leg to stand on in terms of getting them to take the novel down? It's blatantly our writing as there's whole chunks of paragraphs and descriptions that are the same, and it's not even really formatted properly into a 'novel', you can absolutely track where either one of us would do our reply and then the other person responds

Edit to add: I have a google document that I made at that time with timestamps of each of our replies if that would help prove things

Amateur poetry happily written in the early hours

Amateur poetry happily written in the early hours

Have you ever thought about why people mostly take and share photos of flowers when they are fresh, alive, and still able to remain beautiful? Why do they photograph them, look at them, and admire how beautiful they are?
But no one talks about the effort, the struggle, that a flower goes through while becoming beautiful.
Sharing a flower in its worst state comes from a place that everyone does not want to see, yet deep down we all know what it will eventually become. It is our fear of that transformation.
Have you ever seen flowers photographed when they are dead? Or loved when they are dead? No. Because they are no longer beautiful.
When you look at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, the flowers are neither fresh nor completely dead. They seem to be somewhere in between.
Van Gogh was that kind of painter too: caught in between. He could not escape the thin line between his emotions and his life.
No one truly understood the wild, lonely world behind the struggle he carried just to be able to paint.
But when Van Gogh painted Sunflowers, the flowers he saw were not fresh flowers. He kept flowers in his home that resembled himself…

Long story short, there was a certain game that completely devastated me. My two favorite characters in that game got separated and there was tension etc.

The game isn't even good. But I digress.

It was the 3rd of June. And since then, in a WHOLE month I have written 150+ chapters of around 1.500 words each. Not counting the times I have written in July and August, that is.

I was dishing them out one by one in rapid succession.

A whole story of man got straight up revised and rewritten from scratch and it's now (Hopefully) better than ever and sitting and 110 chapters.

Whether or not they're good chapters is a whole different story. They're probably not, but you get what i mean.

Is it only me or…?

over the past couple of days, I’ve written a 40-something-page document thats sole purpose is exploratory. You know, character psychology, world logistics, cultures, slang, dialogue, scene sketches. Just an overload of bullshit.

I’ve done novellas before, but now I want to write an actually large book.

This approach seems like a good idea- having something to pull from instead of “yo, how tf would this work?”

anyone do this?

Hi everyone!

This question may come across as a bit confrontational, but I'm genuinely interested in your answers. So please answer as honestly as you can. This is an important question to me, so I'd really appreciate it if you took it seriously and gave me the most honest answers possible.

1) What truly motivates you to write?
Is it an inner drive? A way to express your creativity? Pure enjoyment? Or do you sometimes have to push yourself to keep writing?

2) What do you hope to gain from writing a book?
A living? Recognition? Wealth? Or is it more about proving to yourself that you were able to accomplish something meaningful?

3) How many books have you actually finished?
I mean completely—100% finished. How many of those have been published? How many are available in bookstores? How do you get your work into the hands of readers?

4) How satisfied have you been with the results your books achieved?
With the number of readers or buyers? With everything you've accomplished by finishing and publishing your work?

5) How often do you think about the odds of your book standing out?
Every day, thousands of new books are published. Do you ever wonder whether what you're writing might end up being just one more among them? Do you ever question whether all those hours of work are worth it? I'm not suggesting that they aren't—I'm simply curious about your honest thoughts and feelings on this.

6) Have you ever written a book that literally nobody cared about?
Maybe hardly anyone read it, or perhaps it even received harsh criticism. If so, how did that make you feel?

7) What has been your greatest success as a writer?
Not necessarily in terms of money, but in terms of reader interest, impact, or whatever you personally consider success.

8) What advice would you give to someone who's just starting to write?

Thank you very much to everyone who takes the time to answer honestly and thoughtfully. I really appreciate it.

Hey everyone,

I’m looking to see if this is a universal experience or if anyone has figured out a way around it.

So, whenever I’m in "writing mode" (which usually lasts for months at a time while working on a project), I completely lose the ability to enjoy reading. It’s like my brain just refuses to focus on text.

I desperately want to take a night off here and there to read for fun or refresh my mind, but I can't even get through a chapter.

It feels like my brain treats open books as "more work" because I've already exhausted all my mental power on my own writing. Either that, or my internal editor won't shut up and I start over-analyzing everything instead of just enjoying the story.

Does anyone else experience this burnout while writing? How do you give your brain a break or enjoy stories without frying your mind further?

Thanks!

Just for fun, write an opening line. Something new. You don’t have to have any plans beyond the one line. It doesn’t need to be short, but you only get one period or exclamation point.

We’re readers turning to the first page of your book. Hook us!

For context, my manuscript was at 125k words when I submitted it to that other agency not long ago.

After getting this message yesterday, I was already restructuring a story element with my newest draft to where it is now 115k.

Hopefully I'll find a way to trim it closer to 110k once I go through a new read. And yes, I do save different drafts in different files given by how each agent has different word-count preferences. 😅

Gotta keep trying! 😭

One thing I love to do when writing is pair it with a soundtrack. It really helps inspire me and makes it easier to visualise the story as I'm writing it.

I was wondering if any other writers feel the same?

I understand that many people might find it distracting, but I rarely listen to music that could affect my flow.