Timewaster's Guide Archive

I have a couple of quick submission related questions.

First, I'd like to submit something this coming Monday. My combined prologue and first chapter comes out to 5,273 words. I'd like to submit them together, though that's slightly over the "standard" word amount. If I just submited the prologue it would be less than half that length. Is everyone ok if I submit them together?

Second, are content tags supposed to be for the work as a whole or just what's being submited now? Because what I'll be sending this Monday has no violence or language whatsoever, but there definitely will be some notable violence later in the story, and possibly some swearing as well, though most of that will probably be in the style of "fantasy swearing."

Thanks in advance.

Hi all.

My name is Matthew Hollingsworth, and I just decided to join this writing group on the recommendation of Chaos2651, who I know from the 17th Shard forums.

But enough about why I joined. Who am I? Well, as I said, my name is Matthew. I am 25 years old, and male, though you probably could have guessed that from my name. My preferred forms of entertainment generally involve fiction in ny of its forms, though I especially love books, video games, and anime/manga.

I am also an aspiring writer, which is another thing I'm sure you could have guessed.  I actually didn't originally want to write. When I was younger, I loved math and video games. (And I still do now that I'm older, I just love other things as well). I wanted to either become a highschool math teacher or a video game designer, and I figured I could break into the video game industry as a programmer, so I assumed I'd be doing something related to math as I got older.

Then tons of personal stuff happened that would take pages and pages to explain, and reveal too much about my family anyays. Some of them probably wouldn't want me blabbing everything to the net. And I'm honestly not sure how comfortable I'd be doing it myself. So... moving on.

As time went on and I came up with my ideas for video games, I realized I really loved creating the story concepts for them, and coming up with interesting ways to take advantage of or incorperate video game conventions into the stories. I realized I loved writing, and so I figured I now had two ways to maybe break into video game design. Programmer, or writer.

Then I realized I truly loved writing more than anything else, and that I would be perfectly happy telling my stories as novels. And so my desires have changed, and I now aspire to be a writer. Though I certainly wouldn't mind working on a video game if I got the chance.

My genre of choice is fantasy. I enjoy reading books in other genres, I'm just not sure I'd enjoy writing them. I love creating unique worlds for my characters to live in, so I'd probably love writing Sci-Fi as well. I'm just not sure I know enough to write good Sci-Fi right now. Oh, I could probably do ok if I did extremely soft Sci-Fi, but my personality is such that I'd want my stories to be a bit more grounded I think. Yes, I have no problem coming up with totally insane things in fantasy, but if I say "this is happening in the real world," I want to be able to at least sound realistc. So for now, I'm focusing on writing fantasy.

Anyways, I figure that should be ok for an introduction for now.