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"Your name", an anime movie also in Netflix that somehow touches the same topic. It's about two teenagers (a boy and a girl), one living in Tokio and another one in a faraway town, who exchange bodies and only communicate through notes on their mobiles. Worth watching.

Kiss,

Gacela

I'm subscribed to Office 365, so I always have Word's latest version. Pasting from Word to TBNW represents no formating issues except that, from time to time, there are some phantom question marks at the end of some paragraphs.

Pasting from Microsoft One Note to TNBW messes the thing up, so it's a no-no. I write in Word, but I keep, my project in One Note and that's where I have my cards, etc. While One Note is great of all that stuff, I need to paste the chapter into Word first, and then copy it from Word and paste it into TNBW.

Kiss,

Gacela

Well done Bobby. Looks terrific!

Kiss

Gacela

If you're worried about a publisher considering this site public, despite being a paid site, peer-to-peer review, etc., a recommendation is to use here a pseudonym different to the one you'll use when you send your work to an agent/publisher, and to use here a different name for your story, so it may be difficult to trace.

Bill's idea of completely removing the story from this site prior to sending it out is also a good one.

Kiss,
Gacela

My personal opinion is that it all depends on how deep or shallow (how subjective or objective) the POV is.

A narration from a "shallow" or very objective POV may be limited to stating facts. Like, "As Mary entered the house, John noticed her keys tinkling and grimaced. She stared him, as if she could read his mind, and asked, "What's wrong with you?" This is purely objective but still from John's POV. The tinkling is mentioned only because JOHN, the POV character, noticed it, otherwise it wouldn't have been observed. It's also indicated that he grimaced, meaning he somehow disliked it, but without explaining exactly why. When she stares at him, she does it "as if" because the POV character can't actually know what she's doing or taking place in Mary's brain. He can only speculate. In this case, rewriting the line as "She stared at him, reading his mind ..." would be a clear POV shift.

A narration from a "deep" or very subjective point of view comes from the depths of the POV character's mind and much resembles a first-person POV narration, even though in third person. "As she entered the house, the ominous tinkling of the keys set off every alarm in John's mind. The same tinkling he had heard as a kid before his mother's murder. Mary was the right age. Had she done it? Her movements that night had never been fully explained. John grimaced, he couldn't help it. She stared at him, reading his mind. She knew he knew. "What's wrong with you?" she asked in that velvety, menacing tone.

The above narration comes completely from the character's POV. The tinkling is only ominous because he perceives it a so—in the first, objective narration, it's only a sound. The important part is when she stares at him and "reads" his mind. No reader—maybe only a few POV-Nazis—will perceive it a POV shift but clearly as John's guess. Whether or not accurate is another kettle of fish, but it's his guess, not  POV shift. If this little paragraph were a full story, the extra context would provide the answer. If he has been digging into his mother's murder, and Mary, the actual murderer, learns about John's digging, this could have been a moment of truth for both of them because both could have remembered that her keys tinkled when she entered John's house gun in hand. John's grimace, his expression, could have allowed Mary to guess that he has finally put together the whole puzzle and has discovered her. On the other end, her own expression, the staring, accurately allows John to guess that she knows that he knows. This happens in real life all time given the proper context and background without the need to read other people's minds or get into their bodies for a short while.

So, conclusion: whether it's an POV shift or not, whether you need to use "as if", depends on how deep, how subjective, your narration from a particular POV is. Should it be subjective, or "deep", enough, then you can avoid the "as if"s because it won't be a POV shift, but part of the subjective narration. If your narration is more objective, describing the reality through the POV character's eyes, but not involving the POV character's opinion, thoughts, and feelings, then you need to use "as if" to make it clear you're not shifting the POV, but still judging the event with objective eyes.

My humble opinion.

Kiss,
Gacela

marianareuter@live.com.mx

I'll be more than happy to help you.

Kiss,

Gacela

It won't work, Dirk. The POV character knows the hooded demon/person/entity's identity the moment the cried "It's you!" There's no way he won't think of it. No way. You may conceal it from the reader during a while, but it depends on how deep into the POV character's mind you work. If all through the story you have narrated the story from deep within his mind, then you can't keep the identity from the reader, at all. If your narration is kinda objective, then there's room to keep the identity from the reader for a while, but not too long. It would feel like cheating.

You may want to read Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It's one of the few successful examples in which a POV character is able to keep important information from the reader without it feeling like cheating.

Kiss,

Gacela

I would even suggest T'Laan has a positronic brain. Asimov invented the term to avoid explanations on a robot's brain how it actually worked. In times when the smallest things they have were these bulbs inside TV sets the size of a car, it was difficult for Asimov to explain unlimited miniaturisation to his readers. Thus, he envisioned computer "brains" working thanks to the creation/destruction of particles as small as positrons (recently discovered by the times of his first stories). While it's not miniaturisation's limit, it's small enough for gazillions of positrons to fit inside a human-size android--or warlock-size--and perform the "thinking" process.

Kiss,
Gacela

Merci, M. Kenny. C'est très illustratif.

Le train est un moyen de transport de masse très utile dans un point de vue économique. You can load it with tons of everything: food, fuel, weapons, soldiers, civilians, etc. Since railroads were laid, they have always played important roles, both in peace and in war. E.g., in the Mexican revolution (actually a civil war, but it started as a revolution against the acting dictator), railroads were so valuable for both sides, none of them dare blow them, keeping both lines and cars in good repair, even at the cost of delivering a tool in the enemy's hands if territory was lost. In WWII, the railroads were the German's mobility spine. Your tyrants would find them quite useful and would be eager to maintain them working, in their best interest.

Kiss,
Gacela