What’s your biggest pet peeve that you see in first lines / paragraphs / pages?
Jackie: Physical descriptions of a character in the first paragraphs. I like to be submerged right into the world, so too much “explaining” in general in those first pages is off-putting to me.
Kathleen: Anything that reads as info dump or trying too hard to paint a picture. I want opening lines that make me want to immerse myself in a story (see post on best first lines).
Mackenzie: Too much passive voice (or general lack of an original voice) and too much telling. Let me discover for myself the characters and world you’ve created.
Danielle:
Throwing us into backstory–I like when the story starts, and we get snippets of backstory and worldbuilding as we go. Also, when the main character has a lot of questions right away, this slows me down because then I have all those same questions too, rather than allowing the questions to come to me organically.
Suzie:
So I know everyone says that writers should start in the middle of things–and this is true, but I hate when the opening starts too late. If a manuscript opens with something super emotional and there’s no lead up to it, there’s nothing to make me feel the same emotions as the characters. As a result, the drama and conflict is lost on me.
I also can’t handle a character looking into the mirror and talking to themselves as an opening.
Pete: When the character is too passive, or when there’s action but no insight into who the characters really are (and why we should care about them). In the first pages, more than anything, I need to be drawn into the character(s). Then I’ll go wherever they’re taking me.
A researcher in Russia has made more than 48 million journal articles – almost every single peer-reviewed paper every published – freely available online. And she’s now refusing to shut the site down, despite a court injunction and a lawsuit from Elsevier, one of the world’s biggest publishers.
For those of you who aren’t already using it, the site in question is Sci-Hub, and it’s sort of like a Pirate Bay of the science world. It was established in 2011 by neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan, who was frustrated that she couldn’t afford to access the articles needed for her research, and it’s since gone viral, with hundreds of thousands of papers being downloaded daily. But at the end of last year, the site was ordered to be taken down by a New York district court – a ruling that Elbakyan has decided to fight, triggering a debate over who really owns science.
“Payment of $32 is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research. I obtained these papers by pirating them,” Elbakyan told Torrent Freak last year. “Everyone should have access to knowledge regardless of their income or affiliation. And that’s absolutely legal.”
A Google Chrome extension that you can press when you think something may be triggering to another person out there. It’s a crowd-sourced thing, so the more people use it, the more it will be able to warn us 30 seconds in advance so we can decide if we want to keep watching. Brilliant.
This isn’t captioning related, but it definitely falls under the banner of ‘Access for All’
While we do ask that folks take a look at our tags, we still get a slew of questions on the same topics again and again, time after time. While we love helping (why else would we be here?), consider this the ultimate post of tag links for those topics we get asked about all the time, and have a hefty number of resources for already.
If, after reviewing posts in these tags, nothing is applicable to your situation, please feel free to send us an ask. And if your question is pretty specific to your story, or you personally, we do often answer questions to those who post off Anon privately. In fact, to better serve everyone, we request that you ask more specific/personal questions off Anon as if it’s too specific/personal, it’s likely an Anon posing such questions won’t get answered in a timely fashion. (And you can always request us to answer your question privately, too!)
These people have generously offered their expertise for when you have questions specific to areas that we may not be as well versed in and/or able to answer in a timely manner (and if you want to be added to either of these, let us know):
Keep in mind that we have tons of tags on various topics. These are just ones we tend to get questions about A LOT. Bookmark this link. Reblog it. Save it. Learn it. Bop it. Twist it. Shake it.
If you want to erase someone from your life (at
least digitally), navigate to their contact card in your iPhone and
scroll down to the bottom and tap on “Block this Caller.”
Or, open the Settings app and click either the Phone, Messages or
FaceTime category. There’s a section that says Blocked, and all you need
to do is tap Add New and add the person you want blocked.
If you just want to filter out messages from numbers you
don’t know, go to Settings, then Messages and turn on the Filter Unknown
Senders option.
Maybe none of these peeked your interest-maybe you’ve been wanting to create an o.c, but never really knew how to start-or you just enjoy making O.C’s….
This masterlist is to help you in making your own OCs….it can also apply to developing RP characters i suppose!(´ヮ`)!
also if you cant get out of a hold, kick them where it hurts, and go for the face, you will have time to escape and/or inflict more pain (been at karate for 16 years btw)
shealwaysreads 