Riah Black

@kathleenramm

Prose. Plots are still a struggle, and themes and characters are both a lot better but still a little hit-or-miss. My prose is still a little bare sometimes, but it’s at least much less stilted than it was then, lol.

@r-m-archer

Ah, yeah. I think we’ve all have written stories all too similar to the traits you described.

Out of all the things lacking in House of Mages, what area do you think you’ve improved the most in writing since then?

@anatra23
Haha, that’s hilarious. It kinda reminds me of the first story I wrote which was literally just the story of…[Read more]

@kathleen

A LOT of things, lol. The characters were all one-dimensional, the plot meandered, it was theme-less, the villain was incredibly non-threatening (especially for being a demon), my prose was lousy…

I was only about… 15 when I was working on it? Which doesn’t necessitate that it was awful, lol, but I’ve grown a lot with my writing in…[Read more]

@not-so-secret-secret-assassin

I’m a tad bit late to the party, but um… here I am.

I tried reading The Wingfeather Saga a few months ago because I thought the cover was pretty epic and a lot of people on the forum liked it, but ummm…

I couldn’t finish it. And for pretty much all the reasons you listed in your essay. I can see why people…[Read more]

@r-m-archer

House of Mages actually sounds pretty cool. What was wrong with that made you not go through with publication?

@devastate-lasting

Woah, that’s a cool idea. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of an idea like that. It sounds like a tricky story to write, but you should totally try going back to that story when you have the…[Read more]

@kathleenramm My second short story I was going to start. It was going to be about characters in a story who were going to be fighting these monsters at the end of the world, but they were kind of like actors in a movie setup with the Narrator as the director. The story would alternate between them inside the Story and their lives outside of the…[Read more]

Hm… This question is tough for me to answer because I don’t often work on stories for a long time and then completely scrap them. If I work on something for a while, it means there’s something to the story that keeps my attention for an extended period of time, and even if the story is largely unsalvageable, I’ll still keep it around in case I…[Read more]

@daisy-torres

Hmmm… maybe I’ll go back to Beatrice and her cow one day. Because yeah, now looking at it there’s a lot of cool ways I could direct the story.

lol. Nothing like a movie or book coming out with a premise oddly similar to the one you are working on to crush your motivation, haha. That’s happened to me at least once before, but I…[Read more]

I’ve recently started rereading it after a few years, so I’ll probably have a better answer after I finish it again, but I did like the characters. I especially liked Oscar, Peet, and Tink in the first book, and I could somewhat connect with Janner since he’s an oldest sibling and works around books. And I liked several of the settings, like the…[Read more]

@daisy-torres Aye, I’ve heard both good and bad things about Wattpad, and I feel like the stuff I write doesn’t fit into the romance vibe of it, so for now I’m hopefully going to be sticking with Webnovel and Tapas. I’m glad you had a good experience with it though.

@elanor Let whoever imprisoned them “let” them out.

@kathleenramm Lemme see if I can find the premise again…

There are 13 worlds. There are Magic Users. There is a question: “Why is there no happy ending for a Magic User?”

13 different installments, following so many different storylines that somehow entwine together.

This is the story of the Magic Users, and their search for a happy…

[Read more]

@kathleenramm Yesss the main trio is so well done! My sister loves them all, which is a big win, haha.

@devastate-lasting

Phil is great. My favorite character would probably Rei, but Norman is just a thread behind. I really like both smart and complex characters who are a lot more than what they appear. I kinda expected Rei in the beginning to be the typical emo kid with black hair and Norman to be the typical smart kid who never breaks the rules.…[Read more]

@devastate-lasting

Oh wow. Thirteen Ways to Infinity sounds crazy in the best way possible. What is the premise?

@daisy-torres Ah thank you so much! Unfortunately, no, I wouldn’t recommend it. The readerbase is very small already and without signing a contract it is hard to garner any attention for your work. Plus, the site caters much more to genres like LGBT.

I don’t have a whole lot to contribute currently because this is an issue I’ve been trying to figure out myself, but I’m very interested to read the discussion and I might weigh in later!

@daisy-torres Ay, I have an urban fantasy series on Tapas called Those Who Were Given Another Yesterday! Feel free to read with the link below.

https://tapas.io/series/Those-Who-Were-Given-Another-Yesterday/info

@sparrowhawke Oh, if you’re 18, I’m sure it’ll be fine. I read Monster when I was fifteen. It’s not too gory, and the most sexual stuff is all implied, nothing really explicit on screen. There’s a lot of murder (crime genre for a lot of it) and a lot of very heavy themes, but it’s all very good, so I highly recommend.