Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
Start as close to the end as possible.
Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.
>>Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
This, too, is the problem with movies and TV shows today. They worry so much about offending anyone they lose the interest of everyone. When was the last time you laughed hard and out loud?
Is there no room for describing the setting? Must every utterance that sets the atmosphere also advance the plot or reveal character? Is there no room for mood?
describing the setting should (ideally) be done through a character's interaction with the setting.
if you're developing some sort of dystopia where everyone is heavily medicated, better to show a character casually take the medication rather than describe it.
of course, that's not a rule set in stone. you can do whatever the fuck you want.
Some authors rarely describe a place objectively. We see a space through the eyes of the characters - and in doing so, we learn about our characters as we learn about the space they inhabit.
sure, if a character is in some narrative role; however I would argue that no author ever describes a place objectively, especially not a completely fictional place. The question really is if the unobjective description serves a coherent narrative purpose.
He's very efficient with prose and I find it a joy to read (well, given what he's writing about it's not always joy, but still). I'm not sure he's following that rule 100% of the time, but it's close. Depending on the setting, you can often describe it through characters' actions or how it shapes them.
Setting would provide the context for action or characterisation to occur in a meaningful way, or provoke it, so it is necessary part of both (if done for either of those purposes). Given that, the charitable interpretation would be to only provide enough description of the setting for that.
And yet, Cities Skylines still (last tried: about 2 months ago) crashes for me when I try to load it in Wayland on Fedora, which has removed Xorg from its updates.
CS1, right? If so, can you please detail what you might have done differently?Load options? Some package or another I might be missing? All I know is that with Xorg it worked perfectly, I upgraded Fedora, and now that I only have Wayland, whatever I was doing before no longer works. I'd be grateful for the help.
I am using a system-installed Steam, but sometimes a Steam Flatpak can help with troubleshooting, because it bundles components inside of the flatpak. Running games this way may give you a 5% performance penalty, but it's a good way to see if you have a packaging issue (other things needing installed, or misconfigured).
Also are you running th Linux native one or the proton version?
I run everything through Steam with the proton compatibility layer forced. It's a steam client option somewhere.
I think they're an app called ProtonQT or something like that. It will enable you to easily download the latest proton-ge version. Once downloaded and installed you will need to restart the steam client, then restart the steam client again after selecting the new proton-ge version as the default.
I'll try again. I tried both native Linux and a dozen Proton builds, and none would load, even with no mods or DLC. I'll try again with the latest, and if that doesn't work, I'll try the flatpak instead of via RPM Fusion.
There is a note on protondb about needing the most recent proton-ge release. Use ProtonQT flatpak, should help you install / maintain proton-ge versions. Will get you the latest updates as they release.
The Steamdeck loads games into some kind of nested x11 renderer-in-a-window, I think. If for no other reason than to try to avoid Wayland’s extra input latency? Dunno. Maybe you lost some component it needs to work, if regular Steam also does that.
Regular steam does not do that. At this point on most hardware (minus SOME Nvidia, I think older stuff like 2XXX) you should have less latency in Wayland than x11.
I was under the impression that some of the anti-screen-tearing and other features in Wayland unavoidably set a higher (and, higher-enough to be noticeable in some contexts) floor on latency, though, because of how those features necessarily work. I don't mean drivers.
Variable Refresh Rate in Gnome. No screen tearing, no input latency hit for full screen games. To make this work correctly, I think regardless of OS, you need to cap the refresh rate to something just inside the max for the monitor. A lot of games these days have fps limiters. Let's say your monitor was 144hz. You'd want to cap fps to something like 140hz. That's going to prevent any screen jank or input latency.
Ex-academic here. I too use/tended to use em-dashes quite a bit. It's easy to compose in Linux (Gnome) with a real keyboard: Ctrl Shift U 2014 is ingrained in my head from using them all the time in my academic work.
Indeed, the compose key is how I've always handled easy access to additional (proper? complete?) punctuation (and several other useful characters) capabilities on desktop Linux for many years now. I usually set the Caps-Lock key to my compose key because I literally never use Caps-Lock anyhow, so it's nice to turn it into a useful key. :)
As an em-dash abuser I have decided that it is a crutch to not think through what I am saying--I can lazily connect a stream of thoughts rather than think clearly and explicitly form sentence transitions and so on
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