I'm guessing the one person who voted the Hunger Games is a masochist :-P
Vote counting is done fairly openly in many places, at-least where I live. You can even volunteer to be one of the counters! (and there are multiple checks, observers from all the parties etc to make sure the results aren't being fiddled.)
OK
One piece of advice I would give is to decide in advance roughly how long you want your novel to be. The first draft of the novel I'm currently writing ended up feeling rushed because I went in with no real idea how long your average novel of that genre is and underestimated the size by about half. So yeah, look up the word count of some books you've already read to get some ideas about length.
That's fair, I could dig around to see if I have anything shorter to submit.
My world has 'labmeat', you can probably guess from the name where it comes from. They're grown in large bags of fluid and then sliced up to form something between bacon and ham. Nice rubbery start to the day ;-)
About a quarter of the way through the second draft, so getting there. It's nice to have somewhere to discuss this, I tend to hold back with family and friends so they'll have a fresher experience when they get recruited as beta readers.
I keep to a schedule of writing half a chapter a week, which usually entails about 1000 to 1500 words of new content (It's a second draft, so including already written content the total word count is longer). My main writing time is after work on weekdays, as well as on my phone during down time at work or when I'm out and about.
My motivation to continue is that I post my draft on a small private forum used by myself and a few friends, who can read my work and give feedback. Knowing that the next half-chapter is expected each Friday, I'm the sort of person who can't bear to miss a deadline :-)
I would potentially be up for this, both reviewing and offering up my own work for critique. I'm fairly new to this scene so a question, is there a maximum limit to what would be reasonable to submit for review? Would a quarter of a novel (about 15000 words in this case) be acceptable, or is that too much in one go?
Essentially in the middle of the 24th century, the Earth was rendered uninhabitable by a war fought with new antimatter missiles. The book never really goes into much detail about this since it isn't really relavent to the story being told, but I like to imagine it started as a regional war between Middle Eastern powers that ended up going global.
Humanity though survived on Mars, which was in the process of terraformed when the war broke out. It has a breathable atmosphere, with enough carbon dioxide to keep the planet warm, and an ocean that covers the north of the planet, but the land is still very desolate and mostly desert. Flora and fauna are restricted to a few species that were brought from Earth by colonists and adapted to survive in this environment. The lack of photosynthesising plants presents a potential threat to the human colonists in the long term, though oxygen levels should be sufficient to support life for the next few centuries at-least.
About a century after the War, at the time the book is set in, the human population is very low compared to pre-war times and live in scattered settlements. Most societies are low-tech and focused on growing enough food and collecting enough water to survive, though some older more advanced technology is still in use by some factions. The most common means of transportation is by small hydrogen airships, with the low gravity of Mars these are far more fuel efficient than heavier-than-air aircraft.
I'm trying to keep the setting all within the realm of science as we know it today, though in some cases such as when super-intelligent AI is involved, you have to speculate. It probably all sounds a little grim but the book itself focuses primarily on children under the age of twelve trying to survive in this world, so I'm aiming for a more hopeful tone overall :-)
Probably that it's set on a terraformed Mars. Otherwise the world I'm writing isn't too different from your standard futuristic post-apocalyse setting, but setting it on another planet leads to some interesting differences from an Earth-based society. For example Mars only has a third of the gravity of Earth, and there is a complete lack of fossil fuels. The seasons and years are very out-of-sync of Earth too.
Sounds interesting, I'll bite.
Agreed, posterity won't be kind to those who have allowed this to happen.
That's a very good point about personification, in my story they're certainly intended to be mysterious, unrelatable and possibly malevolent towards the human children who are the principal characters of the tale. Perhaps 'it' would be the best option, at-least when the narrator is describing them. The machines themselves could use "they" or a fictional neutral pronoun when referring to each other in later scenes.
I'm glad they're finally taking action on these 'pranks', even if 20 years is a bit steep. 5 years would be a sufficient deterrent in most cases. I hope that any judges applying this law will give proportionate sentences, especially if the offenders are still young.
Another auti here, not much else to say right now. :-)
Yeah, a lot of the neutral pronouns I've seen proposed seem absolutely unwieldy to say aloud (xir etc), if I was going down that route I would probably invent my own.



PollsIf you could live in any universe which one would it be?Dec 23, 2016 at 6:05 AM




