Start on 1990s.
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I’ve had another attempt at writing the opening paragraph of Episode One. I know what I need to do so hopefully tonight will be the moment I start catching up.
Let me know what you think of this. I quite like the imagery of it.
The skies are a lovely pale blue. There was not a cloud to be seen. A beautiful sight in stark contrast to the depressing scene below. A derailed train, its side split open, spilling its cargo over the ground: five now empty cages and a large, seemingly undamaged shipping container. Police officers were dotted around the scene; they mostly ignore you, apart from one who points you to the officer in charge of the cleanup.
Edited the paragraph with a couple of changes.
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It feels very detached and matter-of-fact - which, to be honest, I think fits somewhat to the nature of main character’s viewpoint: seen it once, seen it all.
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It’s a description that piques my interest and makes me wonder what’s happened 
There is a tense change - the skies “were” a lovely pale blue vs police officers “are” dotted around, so it is not clear whether the scene is happening in the past or present.
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It’s present tense. I did put were originally but I changed it for some reason I think Grammarly told me to put was or maybe my brain switched off 
Ignore me I misread your comment…I think it’s right now. I’m a bit tired so my brain isn’t firing on all cylinders. hopefully it is right now.
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I found it compelling
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I don’t know what my brain was doing it didn’t click that although “The sky was” is past tense it isn’t “The skies was” that’s the past tense but “The skies were”
I love the English language despite living here for all 41 years that I’ve been alive. It can still stump my brain if I’m not entirely focusing on writing, lol
But still, this has been the first thing I’ve written since my surgery that I like!
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What is the best way to convey two characters speaking at the same time without being confusing or feeling awkward?
I think the grammatically correct way is to have something like:
“Yes,” character a says.
“No,” character b answers (at the same time). Sometimes I see the bit in paraeneses added to it’s own line, or even added before any dialogue.
On separate lines, with an added descriptions that they speak at the same time, but this always felt a little disjointed to me.
Writing it this way, instead:
“Yes,” character a answers at the same time character b says “no.”
This feel more like it is expressing something that does it fact happen at the same time, and makes the ideas feel more connected, but having two different characters speak in the same line, breaks the grammatical rules of dialogue.
Does this make any sense, or is my brain just being weird and overthinking this?
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I think you’re better off describing simultaneous speaking instead of quoting it. Like:
“A and B rush to answer, their ‘yes’ and ‘no’ trampling each other”.
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I did it! I posted my first chapter in my first WIP: Exit Through the Gift Shop (WIP) - #3 by Barry_Joseph
I look forward to hearing your first impressions of it (the good, the bad, and the ugly…)
Btw, I had read I can not make a title longer that 30 characters, I so I shortened it. But then I saw one launch today with more that 30. Can someone help me understand the opportunities here?
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For the folks who have a website: what platform do you use? I want to make one eventually but a lot of the builder sites seem overpriced for what they offer in terms of customization. I’m curious if anyone’s found one they really like.
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I have a wordpress. It’s a bit bare-bones, but I’ve had it for more than a decade, and I’m fairly satisfied with it.
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I have a new Bear blog as of a couple of weeks ago, and paid for the upgrade so I could use the custom domain which I already owned. I used to have a self-hosted Wordpress but it was more expensive than what I needed it for, and the unused bells and whistles had become a barrier to me actually using it.
I find Bear very useful for doing almost everything I need - it doesn’t support comments natively but there are some ways to implement them that I’m planning to look at doing.
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I used to just have a service from a web hotel where I built my website by hand.
In tonight’s news: I finally settled on a title for my Halloween jam game, yay! Now I just need to finish writing it…
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If anyone has some ideas on how to find a previous version of a file or restore a corrupted one, it looks like CSIDE has jacked up Grandparenting’s latest chapter. 7,400 words, at least three weeks of effort. Can’t find a way around it.
I have looked to restore previous versions and it didn’t have any.
@CJW Please, any ideas? I know restoring the corrupted one is a long shot but if I can at least restore a version from yesterday that might be buried in the computer, I’ll only lose a few hundred words instead of over 7,000.
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I’ve just got a free Weebly one. Pretty basic and I don’t really use if got much, but you can list your games, weeks I think you can add a blog page from memory if that’s your thing.
That’s no good. I’ve had corrupted files and there’s often nothing you can do with them sadly. I’m guessing you’ve tried opening the file with a different program like notepad or word and see what it does with it?
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I am sorry to hear this happened today. I have experienced this myself at various times with different files in different apps, so I get the pain.
As Jacic says, sometimes using a different app to open the file will work. Have you tried VSCode to open it?
As a general rule, I try to make 2 backups of my working files every month. Even losing a month’s worth of work for me would be devastating. I wish there was a setting on these apps that allowed us to make automatic backups every week or so.
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Hi hustler, I’m sorry to hear that. I’m afraid I don’t have any silver bullets. You’re welcome to send me the corrupted file and I’ll have a poke at it, but I’ve not had much success with this sort of thing historically.
It’d be helpful to understand the circumstances in which the corruption occurred. Most of the time the (rare) issues with corruption in CSIDE can be traced towards a file write being interrupted by power loss (i.e. laptop battery dying).
I know it doesn’t help at this stage, but I always recommend people install file sync software, like Dropbox or Google Drive. You can have this running in the background and completely forget about needing to manually back up.
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I don’t have any advice for how to fix this particular problem for you but I do have advice for the future, which is that it is probably worth looking into using something like FreeFileSync to do a type of version control.
It’s possible to set that up so that you can just doubleclick a batch file on your desktop and it’ll run something that will back your save folder up to another folder while creating copies of older versions in a third folder. Example: I have FileName in folder A and I keep the backups in folder B. I make some changes to the file in folder A, save them, then I double click the batch file. The older version of the file in folder B will be copied into folder C as FileName_<Timestamp> and then the file in folder B will be updated to match the new version in folder A.
It’s the kind of thing that makes it very easy to have a local copy you work on and ensure that you keep copies of older versions in case you ever need to revert or accidentally save a corrupted file to your backup.
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I do have a Carrd account, which should give both fans and prospective partners an idea of my works.
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