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How much can badly written dialogue take you out of a story? Is it a mild annoyance you can overlook if the plot is good enough? Can it absolutely ruin a story for you? Do you even notice it at all? For me, nothing ruins a story as fast as badly written dialogue. I can overlook a few problems...

Snakes

I got her something almost exactly like that for Christmas, except it was a flower instead of a cactus.

I gave her some jingle bells for Christmas. When she's three or four, I'll give her a recorder. When she's one and two, I think I want to focus on obnoxiously loud electronic plastic toys. This is an art, you see.

Maybe when she's older. She's turning one this month. Not old enough to know what to do with a phone yet.

No go. I made the mistake of mentioning that toy in front of them a few months ago and they said that thing is not allowed in their house. So I'm going to have to find something equally as annoying, but less blatantly "I'm doing this to torture my sister and brother in law"-ish.

My niece is having her first birthday later this month, and I need you guys' help in fulfilling my role as the Crazy Uncle. Give me ideas for the loudest, most annoying, obnoxious, age-appropriate toys you can. I want my niece to love me and her parents to hate my freaking guts. The best idea I...

I like boats. I know, shocker from the guy who keeps talking about pirates, right?

I've never been on a cruise before, but I've always wanted to. Now that I'm at a point where I feel somewhat comfortable with my finances (IE, two steps above abject poverty instead of just one) I'm thinking about saving up to go on a five day cruise to Mexico with Norwegian later this year...

It will, hopefully over the weekend, but until then I must complain about it to anyone who will listen, or at least can't stop me from talking. That's the Common Cold Rules.

My sinuses got me like:

Even as a fifteen year old, that threw me for a loop. They spent the whole series talking about how Max was created to save the world, and the end result of that is that she's...supposed to hold a bunch of anti-global warming rallies? And they needed a bunch of human/bird mutants to do that for...

I'm the opposite. I'll come up with a good idea and become so laser fixated on it that the book ends up being less than 100 pages long and nothing happens that isn't 100% related to the main plot. Sometimes I'll leave it like that, other times I'll try to expand it. You can usually tell when...

James Patterson does absolutely none of his own writing. At best, he might come up with the initial idea for a book before passing it along to one of his "co-authors." That's why each book in his longer series feels so vastly different and disconnected from each other. They were all written by a...

Write spicy chapters between two of the characters you secretly ship, and then delete them before your readers can see it and you bring dishonor on yourself, your family, and your cow. What is wrong with you? Your parents are right to be ashamed.

It kidnapped the princess. Henry went to fight the lick because he had the key to its castle. Why? No reason. The whole adventure is cliche and full of plot holes, and the party is constantly roasting the GM for it.

The way I planned for the part of Henry Rider 3 that I'm currently writing to go was, Henry and her friends get sucked into their world's version of DnD and can't escape until they reach the of the GM's campaign. That was originally going to involve them fighting some monsters, then a boss, then...

Brain parasites that feed on people's creativity.

Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson. I've loved every book of his that I've read, but IMO Mistborn (particularly the first one) hit exactly the right notes the most consistently. As much as I love Stormlight Archive, I have to admit that they're too long to really work with his...

If they have a legal contract saying they're the only ones who are allowed to host that story, and SH refuses to take it down, WN will be able to sue them. And if you think SH won't track your IP address to tell WN that you're breaking you're breaking your own contract with them...then I'm a...