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TL;DR - I am looking into options to provide story recommendations and checking interest. I am exploring options to provide story recommendations. The best option currently to provide relevant to you recommendations is something called collaborative filtering. It is basically what Amazon, Netflix, and every other online video streamer and store uses to provide recommendations. This is an extremely deep technical topic that I'm going to vastly over simplify for this discussion. Basically, a mathematical equation can be created based on user interactions (like reactions, recommendations and reviews), that can predict, often much better than a coin flip odds, that having looked at one story, you'd be interested in another, based on how other people behaved. So, for example, I like Stories A, B, and C. Cia likes stories B, C, and D. The system would recommend Story D to me and recommend Story A to Cia because we have shared interests in Stories B and C. Again, this is simplified to just 4 stories between 2 people. Amazon offers this system as a service. It has a cost, of course. And that cost would be ongoing, since it is a service. But it also offers a stand alone sort of option, where we could build the equation and then do a batch process and create custom emails for all active members, for example. I'm currently checking levels of interest, so please vote in the poll and comment below. Oh, on privacy, the data involved with this is all public stuff. Member #, reactions, recommendations, reviews.

This week we are back to where the action is... verbs! English is the Rube Goldberg Machine of languages and it has a lot of oddities. One of those is this whole concept of regular vs irregular and verb forms. This also ties in with Grammar Guide 6's topic of Verb Tenses. Be sure to check that out as well, if you missed it. Verbs have 5 Forms: Infinitive - the basic form of the verb ➡️ walk Simple Present - Used when the action is happening right now or or happens regularly ➡️ walk Simple Past - Used to discuss actions that happened in the past or existed before now ➡️ walked Present Participle - used in forming continuous tenses, typically by adding -ing ➡️walking Past Participle - used in forming perfect and passive tenses and sometimes as an adjective ➡️ walked Regular Verbs For a regular verb, you form a simple past or past participle by adding -ed to the infinitive form of the verb. Example: walk ➡️ walked Irregular Verbs For an irregular verb, you often change words Example: do ➡️did, done There are over 200 irregular verbs in the English language. Unfortunately, they are some of our most common words and the only thing you can do is memorize them. Here are a few: There are a lot more, post some below that aren't on the list! References: Kern, Jara. (2020). The Infographic Guide to Grammar. Adams Media Venolia, Jan. (2001). Write Right! (4th ed.). Ten Speed Press

depends on the penguins?

I won't claim that mine was an exhaustive list... just the some of the low hanging fruit, so to speak

Welcome to Week 7 of our Grammar Guide. This week is all about Point of View. We aren't talking about the arguing thing though (thankfully). We are looking at this in how it relates to rules of grammar and how it gets applied in writing. First up, let's talk about the Grammar Point of View: Grammar has three points of view: First person - The speaker of the sentence (I/We) Second Person - The person spoken to (you) Third Person - The person or thing spoken about (he, she, it, they) Point of View is also used to describe how a narrative (story) is told. Fiction stories most commonly have Third Person Limited or First Person Points of View. So, lets dive in: Narrative Point of View - When we tell stories, the story has a voice. The voice of the story is the Narrative Point of View. There are generally considered 5 Narrative Points of View (that also overlap on the first 3 with Grammar Point of View): First Person - The story is told through the eyes of the character (I did...) and is limited to that character's thoughts and feelings. This is the most common POV other than Third Person Limited. Second Person - The narrator is speaking to you, the reader. This is not common in fiction. It is common in non-fiction such as speeches and advertising. Third Person - Omniscient - Narrator is all seeing and all knowing. They can (and do) flit all between characters' thoughts and motivations. This was very common in older writing but has fallen out of favor in recent decades. Third Person - Limited (sometimes called limited omniscient)- Narrator relays outside events but can also see thoughts and motivations of the main character. Changing character point of view can occur, but there is usually a break or chapter change to indicate switching of characters. Third Person Limited is the most common point of view other than First Person. Third Person - Objective - Narrator relays events of only what can be seen. You do not see any characters' thoughts or motivations in this view. This is most common in news articles. One of the things that can trip us up as writers is switching points of view midstream or "author voice" intruding. An example is when you are in third person limited as a point of view and suddenly telling what another character thinks or feels. Eh? You can share how the narrating character might think another character feels or thinks, but unless you go full omniscient, this is a writing error. One oddity that is not common is the "Breaking of the fourth wall" as it is called in television. This is where a character in the action turns and speaks to you the reader (or watcher). Kevin Spacey in "House of Cards" did this. Deadpool does this in all his iterations. It's not all that common in fiction writing and can upend a reader if they aren't expecting it. Hope this helps! Let us know what you think below and see you next week!

Hobgoblins are not necessarily Green Goblins...

Thanks for your insights on this @Comicality! Now I just need some time to write to be able to have a next project to worry about it. lol.

Due to the way security is set up, it is STRONGLY advised that you do not edit a scheduled chapter before it posts. Looking at your story history, you have 7 pages of edits records. You have tempted fate entirely too much not to have discovered a new way to break things that we didn't anticipate. (for the historically minded, the security is locking publishing date upon first publicly publishing. Early on we had authors abusing the announcing system by editing their story to jump back to the top of the list. Then we'd get tons of complaints from users that the story was listed as new but wasn't. Most software fixes we do are to correct problems like this and then correct the problems those problems caused. This scheduling quirk has been our bane for 10 years. Every time the forum software updates or the story archive software updates, a new quirk shows up or an old one finds a new method to reappear. We only have the staff to stop the obvious and to verify our published process works) I have corrected chapter 2. However, you've done so many edits, I expect each further chapter will have an issue as well.

I need to work on my time management... work, site, work, site... I game to get away from the computer for a bit. I have been working the outline on stuff though.