I need someone who's willing to read three...well, two and a half...chapters of a goofy fantasy novel and help me get past the point where I'm stuck. I need someone to go "Dude, what should happen next is..." and then I can do that.

'cause I been stuck on this one fucking "and then what?" point for, like, two months.

The first sentence, with two dashes, reads easiest to me. Would parentheses be a possibility? It seems like a parenthetical clarification.

Rephrase, maybe?

It describes as a secondary factor the interests, such as fossil fuel companies and automobile manufacturers, that would directly suffer from a reduction in fossil-fuel use.

I'd love to read a goofy fantasy novel, MM. If I can help with the what comes next question I don't know, but I'll try.

Profile addy good, -t?

Yup.

I had to go look at it to be sure. And I have to step away from the computer for a bt, so don't fret if I don't respond right away.

-t, yeah the problem is that using dashes or parenthesis before the first use of commas will look wrong to many readers, even if technically c correct. I think Ginger is right. Because of context I had to modify her suggestion to:

"It describes only as a secondary factor the interests, such as fossil fuel companies and automobile manufacturers, that would directly suffer from a reduction in fossil fuel use."

[edit] but "only" makes for an awkward sentence.

Punctuation is in no way my strong point. The rephrase is nice and clear.

ETa: does not seem awkward to me, fwiw.

-t, insent. Take a look when you have the time. No rush, seriously.

Susan, this is just a question, not a criticism or a suggestion. I'm just curious about your process. Do you ever write little things that have nothing to do with your current project? Just as a change of pace, or a way to loosen up, use your writing muscles in different patterns, blow some different-colored balloons through the headspace?

Frankly? Not very often. I think that tight focus is mostly natural inclination, since it's an aspect of my personality even when I'm not writing--I tend to focus on whatever I've decided is most interesting and/or important and get snappish when someone tries to distract me or change that focus. So when I'm presented with a writing exercise, my first instinct is to funnel it through my current project.

But I've definitely become more this way since going back to work full-time. I have to fight hard for every bit of my writing time, and I've made a point of bringing the world of my WIP into the rest of my life just to keep me in the right emotional and mental space to be able to write productively during that limited time. So, yeah, I do use drabbles to explore aspects of my characters and plot in a different format because it's another way to keep them alive and in the forefront of my mind when I'm not sitting at home with the WIP file open on the laptop.

t shrugs I know it's not the only way, but I think it's the best way for me, for now. And it helps that I really do love the world I'm building and the characters that populate it. I feel like I don't get anything like enough time there.