Megrim

All caught up and ready for more!

Try reading YA books (young adult). They have the same complexity of plot and characterization, but usually a more streamlined, faster-paced writing style. Also, Brandon Sanderson has a ton of ...

Maybe it's that you don't know how to translate those big ideas into a concrete series of scenes? There's always more details, more "crap how do I get from A ...

The elephant in the room for me is whether this is a romance story, or a story with romance in it? Those are two different playing fields. If it's a ...

Routine! You'll often see in movies some moment where one character is all ready for when the other character forgets/messes up/drops something. For instance, she'll be sitting reading the newspaper ...

You sound just like Dan Wells. If you're not familiar with the name, he's a very successful author and one of the podcasters on Writing Excuses. His debut was a ...

Since you said this is for a contest, you're probably already done and moving on by now xD But I'll chime in anyway. What you're asking about is representation. So ...

On the farming side, I think others have that covered. The farm would definitely be specialized. I don't know about produce, but I know a lot about livestock farming, and ...

I think the others have made the good point that you're approaching it a bit upside-down. Genre is used to describe where a story fits. It's not a template for ...

Thank you @inktopus! I'm very flattered.

Hello! I have been hiding from the world finishing a draft for the past few months. I will start going through these all in the near future. Sorry for taking ...

Blargh apparently no one reads the post.

That sounds really cool! And wow it reminds me so much of a book I was looking at in Barnes & Noble. I have no idea what it was called--I ...

Samk is all set. Who's next?!

Both The Curse of Yig and The Dunwich Horror involve Eldritch-human hybrids, so I'd recommend reading those to see how Lovecraft himself envisioned such things.