OK this is how it works for 95%+ of all votes cast on stories here:
1) The message voters are intending to convey -
5 = I liked your story or you, maybe both
Anything else = I dislike you personally
2) How that message is understood by the author -
5 = You're an amazing author/poet
Anything else = watch your back, you have an enemy hell bent on maliciously destroying your writing career
That sounds like a very useful tool.
Maybe the title of this thread should be changed to something like "A useful tool for proofreading" so that it doesn't get ignored by people thinking it's just another request for an editor
Buz is right, the %age of female users here is roughly a third. The numbers get a bit more interesting though when you look at how women use the site - especially by orientation.
42% of the Chat Room Legends who joined Lush in the last 12 months are female. For Authors the figure is even closer to parity - 46%. Between these groups there's a large disparity in orientation.
Exactly half of the female Chat Legends put themselves as Bi-sexual, 1 in 5 said Lesbian and the same number said Straight. Whereas, almost 40% of female Authors who joined the site in the last year are Straight but only 7% are Lesbian.
Of course these figures don't tell you about all the so-called couples accounts or the "I'm married to a wonderful man (whose cock is in the gallery below) and only here to chat with hot women" or people who just like to pretend to be 19 year old bikini models. But of the 4662 females who used the site in the last month most are genuine (to a degree). There's a huge variety of people here and that's a very good thing.
The best rule is simply to not use character thoughts - it's clunky and not very imaginative.
Show your characters thoughts, don't tell them.
As with most mental illnesses - if you're worried you have some kind of disorder, you probably don't (the exception being hypochondria).
Self-diagnosis is always a dangerous path to take; talk with someone you trust, someone who will listen to you. It could be a relative, a teacher or your doctor - just anyone you feel you can share you concerns with.
It's very unlikely to be extra muscle, it's far more likely to be fluid retention
When you exercise (especially if you haven't for a while) the muscles get damaged - that's the soreness you feel. Muscles absorb a lot of fluid when they're repairing themselves causing them to get bigger. (It's also why guys think they can see results after one workout)
This fluid retention is very common among people starting new workouts. It should only be temporary though, so don't lose heart
If you can block story categories I don't see why you shouldn't be able to block authors too.
You could even stretch the block down as far as specific Tags.
The ones you should be concerned about are the ones who take the test and say they definitely AREN'T psychopaths
Editing, punctuation and grammar? Are you sure you're not looking for someone to write your story?
This could lead to some hilarity in those "avatar above you" word game threads
It's an interesting point, especially in first person narrative, as to whether or not colloquialisms should be used as a tool for story-telling at the expense of what should be"correct".
Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series are told by the main character, Peter. He almost always uses personal pronouns incorrectly: "Me and Lesley jumped in the jag and sped to the Folly".
The verbal mistake rounds Peter as a character, even if it makes your inner pedant shudder. The way people say things can tell you as much about them as what they actually say. Peter's not well educated, he's not even a very good cop - so he would make grammatical errors like that when telling a story.
By the time the third book comes along Aaronovitch is using this to poke fun at people who think he does it because he can't write: "The school was where countless generations of the Peckwater Estate had been educated, including me and Abigail. Or, as Nightingale insists it should be, Abigail and I." Yes, that's a joke at grammarians and it's hilarious, trust me.
Hmm, not sure about that. It doesn't matter that your head is part of you, it becomes the object. In "I lie on the pillow" - "I" is the thing being lain. In "I lay my head on the pillow" the verb belongs to "my head" or my pants or my soul etc
"Now, I lay my hand on her thigh" works for me.
Of course, none of this would be necessary if people didn't insist on writing in the frankly awful first-person present tense
What about "I lay my head on the pillow"?
The stretching doesn't look very good but then neither does the stacking of irregular shapes.
Cropping and centring the image might be better - there are plenty of jquery plugins that can do this for you. Another alternative might be to use empty 100v100 div tags with the image as a tiled background rather than using an img tag.
I get an attack of pedantry every time I get a notification about a friends request being accepted; the two errors in the very short message always stand out.
"Just to let you know LushMember has just accepted your friend's request." - (What did my friend request her to do?)
"Why not say thanks and post something on their wall." - (THEIR wall? Just how many people have accepted?)
