Ookla

I have done this. In fact, I have referred to myself as a hypocrite in Dalinar's sense multiple times. YKYASFW virtually every example of good writing you cite when giving writing advice comes from one of Sanderson's books.

Not really. 5'6''. TPBM likes dates (either possible context ).

Granted. You can no longer eat any of your favorite foods. I wish to be free.

That's how I usually do things, too! The only problem I run into is if I get writer's block on the new project and start another new one, and so on and so forth until I have way too many.

Ouch. I hate writer's block. Always feels like I'm pounding my head against a wall, and usually breaking my skull more than the wall.

Ah, surprises. And POVs. And subplots. Ain't writing such a joy? Good luck, guys!

I feel that. The number of stories I have started, and that I've restarted and rethought way too many times, is much bigger than I'd like. But I believe in you! You can do it! Do you know what it is about chapter six that's getting you stuck? For me it's always that I don't know what happens next, and/or don't feel like writing the thing anymore because I don't know what happens next. I wish I had that problem! My stories always finish at about 1/2 the length I thought they'd be. Is your story ending up long because you have a lot of subplots, or because the characters go off the rails, or just because everything takes more words to write about than you expected?

Yes! Well, I used to, anyway, about eight months ago. I have since purged chemistry from my brain. Is that onw the PV/T=PV/T equation, or am I crazy? TPBM is crazy.

Yeah! That's the idea. Way easier to understand what's going on, in my opinion. I now know that Mr. Xander wants to be the botany head, and you've gone and dumped me on a cliffhanger at the end, too. Who's breaking into the botany lab?! I must know!

(Gasp!) Heresy! Jasnah Kholin must not die! Sanderson has already toyed with my emotions on that front once; he doesn't need to do it again. (Hmm, I wonder what would happen if Jasnah ended up as one of the champions in the Contest... But that's a topic for a different thread. )

Yes, three books of it. Then I gave up, because as much as I think the story is cool, I couldn't handle another eleven of them. Plus, it'd take too long to borrow them all from the library, and I don't have the money or inclination to buy the rest of them. Call me a heretic if you like, but I believe the Stormlight Archive is and always will be better. TPBM is way too fond of D&D.

???????? Y'all are so weird sometimes, and I mean that in the kindest possible way.

Gets an arm. Inserts 2 pieces if shalebark.

Gets Minecraft. Inserts 42 emerald broams.

Granted. You have been given a vial containing a single flake of Lerasium and eight grams of powdered lead. I wish for a personal Irish band to play for me whenever I wish.

I now understand a couple of member titles I did not understand before. And, apparently, I have lost The Game.

Oh, yes, several. Stories, Fahlo bracelets (they're actually super cool), chonky rings (okay, not crazy chonky, but definitely not thin little twiggy things like most girls in my area seem to wear), pocketknives, random and useless information... You get the idea, right? TPBM thinks Christmas lights should be left up until Valentine's Day.

Rosharan waffles! Lift must have waffles, and wafflespren must be a thing! (These points have already been made. Sorry) Furthermore, with my vote caste, Rosharan waffles are in the lead! Edit: Oh, snap, I spelled cast wrong. It's funny, though, so I'm going to leave it.

I solemnly believe that Irish dance is the best and most highest form of art there shall ever be. Just you try watching Riverdance without being blown away by it! (And yes, perhaps I am biased because I am an Irish step-dancer and have a great love for all things Irish, despite not being Irish myself, but it is absolutely incredible.) Do you regularly wear jewelry? If so, what kind?

Like... one shift and then I'm stuck in whatever form I chose? Or one shift as in I can flip-flop between my human form and one other, but only one other? If it's the first, I'm going to shift myself some wings so I can fly, but retain the versatility of a human form. If it's the second, DRAGON, ALL THE WAY!!! (Even if only a very small dragon, so as to fit into more cramped spaces.) If you had to listen to one song on repeat for the rest of eternity, what song would it be?

I can imagine. Writing outside one's normal process is, I hear, very difficult. (I don't have personal experience on the matter, though, because I'm still trying to figure out what my process is to begin with.) The best I can do is wish you good luck!

This is a club for any and all authors who need to vent about their Works in Process (WIP, for those unfamiliar with the terminology). Are your characters doing unexpected things? Is your plot full ofbholes? Is your super-awesome worldbuilding somehow not working out? Come and talk about it; you might work through your frustration to inspiration! Real-life example: I'm on the fourth major re-write of my novel, just got my latest round of beta-reads back. I've been going through and making the changes, and, foreseeing a problem with my new plot adjustments, introduced a new minor character so I'd have resources on hand to solve the future complications with. Now, Rockwell is a very nice man. However, he's also a very dutiful man, and at the moment, him fulfilling his duties to the King Regent is messing with all the plans I had for my runaway-princess MC. My plot hath been thoroughly derailed, and I now somehow have to work around the complications Rockwell has introduced, because he started doing things much earlier than I was expecting. Sigh.

Or, perhaps instead of doing long-lost descendant, you could go even a little bit more Mistborn and make him a forgotten, illegitimate child, or the child/grandchild of such a person. Or there could be a coup, and the original line isn't in power anymore, though a related line is, and he's actually the Crown Prince, but he's been in hiding since early childhood and doesn't remember his heritage. There's a handful of ways you could make it work. Also, the concept of magic mist dripping from stalactites is, frankly, ridiculously cool. I'd be tempted to, ah, 'borrow' that idea myself, if it weren't for the fact that I've got half a dozen stories clamoring to be finished at the moment. What does the mist do? What do the magic powers look like? Are they related to some kind of mist manipulation, or do they let people fly, or do they make your body mutate so you sprout wings and fangs and claws and stuff? How many kinds of mist are there? How are the different powers that come from the mist related to one another? What are the mechanics of this world? How has the culture been shaped by the fact that going into the mist is a Very Dangerous Thing To Do? What sorts of creatures live in the mist? What do the people eat? How do they get their clothes (do they grow some kind of fibrous plant or do they depend on animals to source their materials)? If you want more questions to answer about the setting, let me know. I'm sure I can come up with some.

Take what I say with a big handful of salt, because I don't actually know precisely what your story needs. This is just stuff that's worked for me in the past. Also, sorry for the long post. I started writing out ideas, and apparently I lost track of when to stop. In both instances, it feels like you're trying to dump a lot of exposition in right at the beginning. There's a lot of information there, and it's making my head spin. Now, I don't think it's a problem to have a couple of exposition-heavy scenes--the exposition has to come in somehow, and a scene that has a tad bit more explaining in it than the rest do isn't an issue. However, with your log-entry method, the first problem I'm running into is that you're jumping from one place to another in your exposition without a lot of rhyme or reason. Let the prose flow from one idea to another naturally; don't try and force in exposition that doesn't fit. A person making a log entry is probably going to have one or two primary things on their mind and go on at length about those, and then maybe mention the other stuff in passing, but it doesn't feel natural to jump from Thing X to Thing Z and back to Thing A without any kind of transition. For the other narrative style, it might be good if you add in some scenes relating to other things. A story isn't just about the main plot; there's a lot more going on all at once. So they've gotten their essence-stuff, but now they've got those four weeks of study-time in between. The characters aren't going to be studying 24/7 for four weeks; they need to take breaks and go do fun stuff while their brains process what they've learned. So, you can throw in a couple of those scenes, and perhaps start setting up some of the politics on the ship through conversations with other characters, without having to say that the MC is hoping to get elected outright. For example, if the MC is sitting down to dinner with a friend, and the friend asks, "So, you still planning to run for botany head?" And then, if there's someone nearby who doesn't know the MC as well, they could pop in with, "Aren't you a little young for that?" Right there, you've set up the MC's goals and the fact that they're younger than any botany head before, but it feels a little more natural. Where right now you're covering four weeks of time in 2-3 pages' worth of text, if you go into a little more detail about what sorts of interactions they're having, both with other crewmembers and with alien species, those four weeks could make up a much more significant portion of the novel. (I speak from experience; I too tend to gloss over those sorts of everyday, 'mundane' interactions in favor of the more interesting and fun stuff, but I always hit a point where I wonder why my book is so short, and then go back and realize I've left a ton of stuff out. ) And, finally, as an example of great exposition: In the Stormlight Archive, at what point do we actually know for a fact what highstorms and spren are? We hear about them a lot as we're getting into the story, but as I recall, I couldn't properly visualize a highstorm and what it could do until Kaladin got strung up and pretended to be a banner in one, and Sanderson doesn't explain what spren are until somewhere around the second book. We get a sense for what they are from watching how the spren react to people's emotions and natural phenomena, but the actual technical explanation of 'It's a Splinter of a Shard' doesn't come in for a long time, well after we've been introduced to them. So, don't just tell me what the essence does, show me the characters trying to use it and accidentally blowing their faces off. You can tell me a little bit about it as they're setting up an experiment, sure, but if it's a super mysterious substance, we probably ought to learn more about it by watching what happens in the scientists' experiments than by listening to the scientists' hypotheses.

Mistborn. Cool as kandra are, Mistborn are, in my opinion, way cooler. I mean, how amazing would it be to be able to fast-travel by Pushing and Pulling on cars on the road? Honestly, you could even just pick a random car and Pull on it just enough to trail behind it like some kind of crazy streamer or kite. WYR have a pet axehound or a box of Midnight spores?