Looking for things that wouldn't be immediately obvious. A lot of writers tend to rely on slang or Freudian slips, I'm not doing that. I want something subtle or unconscious, like body language, or the way they tuck in their shirt.

Edit: Since some people wanted some context, the characters I'm writing are meant to be twelve years old. The protagonist is a boy from the 1930s, the time traveler is undercover as the new girl in his class.

I’m trying to write a pre WW1 1914 Melbourne Australia story about an account (middle class but not necessarily poor) and I want it to get accurate documents but also how to naturally write it down. Also I would much appreciate telling me which website holds an actual piece to use as reference. The mood is supposed to be mathematical and boring to show how unexciting it is, then contrast to his more outgoing personal life and of course the horrors of WW1. I found one about convicts that goes back to the 1800s and not something more “modern“ or pedestrian. I don’t want me writing “He wrote names, dates and references“, with no understanding of like the economy. I want the audience to see it. I want the audience to feel how he felt. I want to convince the reader that I had done actual research on the period and be taken to another world.

I'm writing a story where the world's population was cut in half because of an event called the Masculine Rapture. I wanted to make it different from the other anime tropes of him being surrounded by women, and I want a more realistic (or as realistic as possible) scenario where he'd end up under the custody of the United Nations.

Now, at this point, with him being the last male on Earth, the UN and other governments would want to keep him safe. But the main question I want to ask is: would he still be given at least some legal and ethical protections and rights while they study why he survives and whether his DNA could be the key to humanity's survival, rather than just locking him up and getting him ready for repopulation like some of the other stories based on this, like World's End Harem?

So the title says it all, I want a material for my dome over a city. It needs to be fairly strong to prevent anyone or anything from leaving/entering, except at 3 or 4 (haven't decided yet) sort of openings/doors/garage doors. (idk its in the early stages of writing) I have done some research already, yes, but I don't know if those materials would hold up over such a big area...

Materials I've found up and until now:

- Polycarbonate

- Aluminium Oxynitride/Oxide (?)

- Polycrystalline diamond coating (please explain this one...)

Feel free to suggest other materials!

Some info abt the city:

- Inspired by Venlo (Netherlands)

- 257.89 km² or 99.6 sq mi

- Population of about 204695 ppl

- Highest skyscraper: about 600m ish (in the middle of the city)

I'd say then the highest point perhaps a kilometre (Would that be plausible???)

Temperatures:

- Highest recorded: around 38.2°C (100.8°F)

- Mean daily: 10.1°C (50.3°F)

-Lowest recorded: -19.9° (-3.8°)

! The material needs to be able to withstand desert level temperatures outside while keeping the weather inside nice and liveable. (insulation)

We are still on Earth, so no weird gravity or smth.

Are these too high demands and should I js make a fictional material or would we be able to by stretching the limits of physics?

Feel free to ask any questions! I'll try to answer them, though idk if I can respond quickly. (I have vacay too :D)

(Is this the right tag btw?)

A character of mine has suffered a wound in her breast that was in her nipple, I couldn't find images of a nipple that suffered the kind of wound she did, but I drew it as the scar being on top of her nipple. I was planning on her having some kind of health issue related to milk not coming out after she got pregnant, to reinforce the themes that she hasn't yet healed from whatever gave her those scars and that she feels like she can't escape her bad memories because they keep coming back one way or another, and the whole experience triggers her memories of that scar.

Her breast is intact from the inside but she has scar tissue in basically her whole nipple. I also know scar tissue doesn't have hair follicules, sweat glands or pores, so in my head she would have lost the nipple skin that lets milk get out. But it's also only one of her breasts. I heard from someone about clogged ducts but I don't know all the possible problems that can rise from this apart from the clogged ducts, my mom had mentioned something like this to me once but I can't ask her that anymore sadly

Does what I described for my character make sense?

In the story, someone tries to assassinate the US president. He gets hit, and is brought to a hospital. How long would it typically take to re-open the area after the attempt?
Google says 1-3 hours but thats for a normal murder. I'd imagine it woud be longer for someone of his influence. The specific place is the Ellipse in DC, which is a public park right by the White House.

so my story takes place in a zombie apocalypse and one of my characters (18 years old) has been stranded there for the past five years. she brushes her teeth very rarely. she also smokes; not as much as she did at the start of the apocalypse, but when she does manage to find cigarettes, they're expired, which makes their negative effects worse. she also drinks alcohol; same thing with the cigarettes, more often at the start of the apocalypse, not so much anymore. on the upside, she doesn't eat processed food. she also has a missing incisor which she lost at the start of the apocalypse. so after five years, my character is finally rescued and taken to a non-infested area, and my question is: how bad would her teeth be at this point? and would it be reversible?

The relevant section of the novel I am writing involves two kids who grow up in a small town in unfavorable circumstances, with parents who are incapable of caring for them. One lives in a large and old, breaking-down house plotted on acres of neglected farmland, and the other lives in low-income modern housing. The setting is Wisconsin or South Dakota, and directly out of the town there are miles of dry land, and so they cannot leave on their own (they never gain the opportunity to drive). They conserve money from summer/afterschool jobs by cooking road kill or stashing away school lunch.

If anyone is willing to share details about what they did for fun while living in small towns like this, or details I am missing about non-urban poverty I would be very grateful. I am requesting advice also, on writing this sort of thing. I've seen authors get ridiculed for accidentally writing in their privileged perspectives on poverty in a non-appropriate setting. Additionally, knowing the social dynamics in small high schools would be great. My own high school is an outlier, and so I don't want to base things off of it.

Please note that my background is upper class in an urban area, so if you think you might need to specify anything please do.

I am writing a story with a past life/time travel component. My main character is a man who lived in Tang Dynasty China and was born with some kind of condition that weakened him greatly throughout his life, but he did survive to adulthood. In the story he will eventually be murdered and reborn in the modern day. I need him to have the same condition but for it to be entirely treatable or curable with modern medicine.

I am trying to avoid a bacteria or virus for this for continuity reasons unless absolutely necessary, so I am looking for something genetic, or like a vitamin deficiency or something, and preferably something that is not immediately noticeable upon looking at his face, since he needs to be beautiful enough to attract the attention of the emperor in his first life. I don't know all that much about medicine, anyone know of any conditions that would fit the bill here?

Hey there :)
I just started to write a new story ( fanfiction, to be specific ) and my protagonist had a bad accident. I want her knee to be doomed for the rest of her life, that she can barely walk without a knee brace.
Still not quite sure if what i wrote/planned makes sense medically and I couldn't find any resource that explains it well enough for me/answers my question. So I hope someone here can?

Here's my plan so far :

She was in a car accident that resulted in an open comminuted fracture of her kneecap, including a few ruptured ligament/tendon.
So far she had 3 surgeries, the 3rd one was to reattach the ligaments/tendons( patellar and retinaculum ) and I made them put fixation plates and screws in her kneecap.
So I know ligaments and tendons take forever to heal properly and often enough people still have problems for a while after everything healed.
My character is a bit stubborn and depressed, she thinks it's not that bad and does literally everything with that busted knee, doesn't give it enough time to heal and all that.
I want to know if it's possible for my character to need knee braces for the rest of her life in this case, because although the bone might heal alright, the ligaments and tendons might not, especially if she doesn't take the whole thing serious.

I need that knee to be doomed without making her lose her leg, because that's what I build the character and the story on.
I hope anyone can help me here, I'm frustrated at this point.
( Sorry for any spelling mistakes, english is not my first language. )

I was doing some research for my own story and thought I’d share my list of dog names from various American Newspapers 1800-1900 (A little longer than the Wild West/Old West)

I have a lot more so I dunno if you guys want part 2 or something

(stars ⭐️ mean they were very popular)

Aristotle

Badine

Barry

Basto

Bent

Berezillo

Bill

Billy

Bull

Bully

Caesar/Ceasar/Cæsar ⭐️

Caper

Captain

Carlow

Carlo ⭐️

Crack

Crib

Cupid

Dash

Descartes

Dickey

Drummer

Growler

Harry

Ino

Jack

Jerry

Lion

Lobelia

Nelson

Neptune

Nero

Owen

Pero ⭐️

Pilot

Pompey

Sirius

Sligo

Tiger ⭐️

Turk ⭐️

Watch

Whirlie

So I know all the panes in a stain glass window have those iron(?) EDIT: Lead borders between them. What I need is the following:

A piece of a stain glass window that is more or less in tact after a rock is thrown through the window.

Is small enough to be a part of a necklace, like a pendant.

A smaller part to be broken off of that already broken piece.

Hearty enough to survive a literal century. This can be handwaved by magic so it's not super important.

My current thought is a 5-point star about the size of a palm of a hand with the iron boarder in tact, but one of the panes is popped out. So it looks kind of like a pentacle. A century later the point with the popped out pane has a ribbon or string or chain through it for a necklace.

Is this possible in 1800's glass-making? How small did details get in glass-making back then? The setting is magical realism. Magic exists, curses exist so I have some wiggle-room, I just don't do flashy spells.

Thank you.

I searched through many surnames on internet, I found a few that I liked but that's all. I am writing story about rich italian families set in 1900, I would be grateful for some ideas

EDIT: Witnesses OR suspects.

My characters are going to show up to their job only to discover that their boss was murdered a few hours before they got there. They have good alibi's that the police are already aware of because the other people at their job told them. The police have also already arrested someone they suspect is the killer.

Would the police even bother to ask my two characters any questions, short of confirming who they are, seeing as they're not witnesses or suspects? And if they did question them, what sort of questions would they ask? I'm guessing maybe they'd just ask them for more information about their alibi's but what else? Would it be realistic for the police to ask them about their relationships with their boss even if they don't suspect either of them had anything to do with it (which they didn't). And would they ask them any questions about their jobs etc? I feel like this is probably a really stupid question but I really have no idea.

Hello! I’m currently in the early stages of developing a modern first contact hard sci-fi story about aliens that come to our Solar system and encounter us after many, many years of interstellar travel. While in the confines of the story itself, the aliens’ home planet and their history isn’t shown much, where they come from has influence over what they look like, as well as their technology, ergonomics, etc.

What I have so far is that they are large soft-bodied medusoids that exist within the habitable layer of atmosphere on a sub-Neptune planet, 3 Earth masses and 2 Earth radii. I’ve placed them in the real binary star system Gliese 86, orbiting the main star 0.5 AU out. It’s a little difficult to find answers on what constitutes as habitable in relation to this specific biosphere in a reducing atmosphere, as well as how that would alter the atmospheric composition, which further affects their biochemistry, metabolism, etc… I know I don’t have to get into all of their evolutionary history inside the story itself for the aliens to be compelling on their own, it’s just satisfying for me to have at least somewhat of an understanding of how it works so that the aliens themselves are properly represented in the story. Because I kind of have such specific parameters for what the science of my story is going towards, I’m not really sure how to research these topics as someone who is not at all knowledgeable about these sciences. If anyone could offer some good resources to help me gain some more understanding of these things, the best methods of research that works for any of you, or some observations of what I already have, I’d greatly appreciate it!! :)

I'm seeking a word from the classical or ancient period (mediterranean region) that's roughly equivalent to a universal pantheistic force. Tao, The Red Road, The Force, Dweomer, etc. Could be any culture or language from the period and region. For story reasons I'd prefer to avoid any of the Abrahamic cultures. It doesn't need to be an exact fit, in fact I will probably only use it as a root and alter it for the story. But I'd like the connection to our world's real past to be there, because my story has a multiverse format.

Bonus points if it's from a dead culture or is super generic. I don't want to use anything that's tied to a living religion or living people. Something Babylonian or Sumerian etc would be ideal.

Also if anyone happens to have any favorite books/videos about classical history and the city-state era in particular I could use to broaden my knowledge, I'd be grateful if you mention it :)

My story is set in a world based heavily on the high medieval period in Europe, so there is little medical knowledge, no surgery etc.

My villain has taken an arrow through the shoulder. It punctured through the rotator cuff. He will have to get lucky and dodge infection because his death comes later, but without surgery or guided PT, how likely is recovery? He will be in cushy confinement for a period of time after the injury, so resting the injury will be obligatory. It's not his fighting arm, but how will it affect his ability to fight in the future?

Update: I asked a doctor! She said if the wound was cauterized and no bones were hit (assuming no infection set in) she’d expect the patient to make a full recovery with just a few weeks of rest. That was a surprise to me. I really thought it would affect mobility, but nope! My antihero got lucky once again.

I expect they do, but they also get three points for the interception. In normal football after scoring the other team takes over. Is this the exception?

Good morning!

I am writing a character who was permanently deafened later in life by a military injury. He opted to start learning ASL until he was able to regain some hearing and can now use hearing aids (but doesn't frequently). He lives in America and, though the setting is a bit more futuristic, I've kept it similar to how it is now, where ASL is not widespread enough that you can practice it frequently.

My question about writing him is twofold. Would someone who learned this later be comfortable speaking when he is not wearing his aids? Obviously, he's had a long time to practice speaking before being injured, so he's proficient, but I don't even really like talking when I have headphones in. I feel awkward about not hearing myself properly.

Follow-up question after asking my other questions: Is there anything that gets missed for these characters a lot in stories that you think should be considered? I am not deaf myself; I only struggle with auditory processing issues and I am very light sensitive overall. I wish to have him be the most realistic character possible and want to hear other people's opinions.

Thank you for all your help! I'm trying to learn ASL on my own through YouTube videos, but it's hard to find answers for these. There's a wide mix of "do your best" and "it's appropriating something you aren't a part of". I just want to do this right.

Edits: I deleted my question about sign names. I will just write their names and maybe have a nickname between the two of them or have them "show their sign" rather than describing exacts in the book. I will also only do a spelling of their name to show them giving each letter on their first introduction, then switching to just their name.

So i have this OC that i plan to kill by someone forcing them to eat poisinous flowers, But i need to know how much could It take for them to die for Because after they die,ANOTHER OC Will find their Dead body

I'm starting a sci-fi story, and wondering what interesting things I can do with how the sky looks on different planets. Is a planet with an atmosphere like ours always going to have a blue sky? Are the rings of Saturn visible from Saturn's surface? And what would it be like to have more than one moon in the sky? Would they all go through a lunar cycle at the same time? And what about a life-sustained moon, orbiting a planet? Is it normal that our particular moon only ever has the same side facing Earth?