Thanks, The Syntax Soviet!

Yes, your post was very helpful indeed. Helped me get a lot of things straight about the process.

Would you happen to know the last feasible time a plot can be changed during the process? I imagine it will be before the book plates are made, but how much before?

For example, would it be feasible for JK Rowling to say at some point during the publishing/pre-printing process (after submitting the final draft and going through the initial edits) "Sorry, I've decided to kill another character"? And if so, at which stage of proceedings would publishers be likely to reply, "Sorry, not gonna happen"? Or is she famous enough that she would be likely to given a lot of leeway (for example, they might let her change the plot even though the book plates had already been made?)

For me it feels like maybe you're putting in too much world and not enough people, so the hook reads more like a travel guide rather than a story. Why not start with the main character, talk about what his story is, what he wants out of life, and what he's maybe intending to do and so on and THEN talk about the lunar eclipses and guilds and the world behind it. I mean, mystical worlds are great things and fun to visit, but ultimately people want things to HAPPEN in a story.

Which looks to me like the trend for Romantic Vampires basically stealing stuff from older depictions of Faerie in the first place.

I know; it feels like even when you're writing about something that is really truly seriously NOT a vampire, someone can point to one or two traits and say, "That's kind of vampire-y" even if it is nothing of the sort.

Really, if one were to tally up all the traits displayed by vampires in modern (romantic or not) fiction, pretty much ANYTHING goes.

Right with you. I miss the days when vampires were something to be afraid of. One of the things I love about Dresden Files. The vampires are damn scary.

Ah, but even there the vampires are separated into good (Susan, Thomas) and bad (Bianca), so they're not simply out and out monsters anymore.

The thing that currently frustrates me on a writing level is that whatever trait you give to your supernatural beings, somehow it can be twisted to feel like a vampire trait. Zombies who are undead and wandering around looking for someone to love and cherish instead of just bleating for brains; Fae who are seductively gorgeous, can predict the future, can fly etc etc...all end up sounding like imitations of vampires, even when they're not (if that makes any sense). There are only a fixed number of traits an author can go with, and even if you choose to work with a troll or some relatively-unheard-of mythical creature from an ancient civilization, it ALL ends up sounding slightly vampire-y. Is it just me? Or have vampires really taken over the world?

Thank you soooo much for the site with the demographics!! It's super useful. I took a look around the Tenderloin area I was thinking of, and it does look primarily white and Asian.

I know some people that live in Kensington, which is across the bay on the North side of Oakland, and fits your description fairly well.

Hmm. I was hoping for somewhere in San Francisco, preferably near the Tenderloin for various story reasons.

I don't know that it would need to be super suburban. Mostly what I really need is a flat roof (and to my dismay, it looks as though many roofs in SF are pointed) because some story action needs to take place on the roof of a residential house. Hopefully there would be few neighbors around too because otherwise they might call the police about the weird things happening next door.

Or am I making this too hard on myself? 

I think it's important to have a very clear idea of your story's setting (as in, how everyone got to where they were, how supernatural creatures were born, how everything works in terms of biology, physics etc), but not to info dump everything on the reader. I really hate those books that spend pages and pages describing the history and science of their world until the reader wants to scream "NO ONE CARES!!" (a variety of this is the thinly disguised Q&A info dump wherein a newcomer spends pages and pages asking pointless questions about the history and science of said world...)

I would definitely agree that if you look long and hard enough, you will find one or two, maybe even several, fantasy authors who have no English major/creative writing course/Classics education etc of any sort. But are these people the exception rather than the rule? Maybe these are the one in a million extra extra good at writing people...?

On the flip side, I would also agree that there are people who are English majors who couldn't write a novel to save their lives. And there's nothing wrong with that, if they weren't interested in writing a novel in the first place. (Because not everyone is as obsessed with writing as writers are )

I think on a deep level I am worried of not putting in enough symbolism or hidden meaning or whatever it is they put in the Cliffsnotes these days.

On a not so deep level I sometimes just feel inadequate for no reason at all. (Don't we all?)

In a way, it's kind of like music. I listen to a lot of pop music, so let's go with that as a metaphor. I haven't seen many pop artists out there who didn't have some sort of musical education, whether it was at a high-class private school, a music major at college, or, at the very least, most of them have taken piano/guitar/bass lessons.

Are there pop musicians out there who don't know how to play instruments? I'm sure there are. Are there pop musicians out there who don't know how to read music but can write their own songs? Yes there are. Are they good musicians? Some of them are, depending on who you ask. Are there many of these musicians? No.

So I guess the big question I'm trying to ask is, what makes me think that I can be one of these musicians? Am I in fact just another wannabe on American Idol?

I'll just go off and wallow now....

You've also got Bram Stoker, Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Dan Brown, or Jim Carroll, none of whom had English degrees

Dan Brown has degrees in English and Spanish and taught high school English for a while before becoming a writer...

Just out of curiosity, why do you ask? Is it because there's a lot of things that people say with regard to writing that's hard to understand and not having spent years of dedicated education to the subject you feel like perhaps you're behind the curve?

I think it's just that when I stand in front of the fantasy section of my local bookstore and look at the current names on the bestseller lists, I find that most if not all of them are English majors. (I focus on the fantasy section because that's the genre I personally like the most to read and write. No disrespect intended to other genres and authors).

So it makes me wonder, maybe I'm missing something here. Like maybe I didn't get the writer memo where it says, "Thou shalt be an English major to be a fantasy writer".

I don't think I have trouble understanding concepts laid out in writing books (I do sometimes ignore writing advice that I don't think applies to my own writing or my personal style, but not because I don't understand it), so that's really not the issue here. I will admit to sometimes rolling my eyes at teachers who Cliffsnote every good bit of fiction into symbols and metaphors and whatnot (good thing I didn't become an English major then, I guess) but at the same time I do wonder if maybe there is some sort of "Rules of Fiction" thing (like a more general and more complicated version of Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces) that should be applied to fiction to make it good.

I think I could do with some moral support about now....