The BSN writers club

So, as to your question. No the two terms are not interchangeable. Two differently constructed bows, two different shooting techniques.

Rewriting? Alternative C? I don't see any problems with that. But that could be because I constantly rewrite my own stories. "Find & Replace" is your friend.

As always:  Weapon vs Armor depends on both the weapon and armor. Armor evolved through the centuries but also often had a long life. It was expensive, so was changed to fit later owners etc. Old bad armor was better than no armor, but at a disadvantage when facing a more modern sword or an invading english archer.

In the last decades a lot of understanding about the longbow/"warbow" has been gained, thanks to all the Warbow societies. But I have not really been part of that journey. Me and my cousin used to make bows, but that ended and was a long time ago. So my main view of this comes from one old test which a couple of british museum custodians did a video of a long time ago - I guess it must have been in the 1980s - and some very serious testing done by the Royal British Army ballistic research department.

In the case of the museum guys, they used a very wimpy longbow, like 50 lbs (this was before Mary Rose), and the guy who was shooting didn't even appear to be able to draw it fully. As I remember it, they tested three different arrowheads. The broadhead, the bodkin and a longer, slim, heavy and hard arrowhead they hypothesized was made for piercing armor. So was the bodkin, of course, but this was heavier and harder. They shot at quite close distance (close to point blank) and with a very shaky pull.
The long arrowhead easily penetrated armor (plate + mail I think?) which the bodkin couldn't fully pierce.

The british army tests also used a somewhat wimpy bow. I don't remember exactly, but I think it may have been like 100 to 120 lbs? At this time - despite the Mary Rose finds - the discourse was still dominated by historians who had written - contrarian to historical accounts - literally entire libraries of how the Brits "really" won the battles at Crecy and Agincourt etc., how it wasn't really the bow because "50 lbs" longbows couldn't penetrate armor, - no, the french horses were stuck in the mud, bla, bla etc. So these people frantically worked overtime behind the stages to bring down the estimates of the bows' drawing strength. So that is probably why those tests used such a wimpy bow.
Anyway, I think they only tested bodkins, but the bow fully penetrated a heavy 1500s breastplate (made from modern steel) at 20 meters, with a bodkin. Notable is that that breastplate was considerably stronger and heavier than earlier knights' plate armor of earlier ages.
Anyway, the main conclusion was that it was mainly at close range that the bow defeated armor in a fatal manner.

And all that is from my memory, thus probably flawed. You might find better if you google it and find the real sources.


What would be interesting is what a heavier arrow with the long arrowhead would do to typical armor at longer ranges, from a real "warbow". That is something I would imagine the modern Warbow societies experiment with. But I have no info on that.

What I have perceived as the main understandings gained recently, is: You don't really aim. You look at the target and trust the muscle memory. You release as soon as the bow is fully drawn. The arrow goes on the right side of the bow, not the left.

And I thought I had problems getting my ideas out of my head and onto the page.... I think you sell yourself a little short as from what I've read of your GoT fic you've done well and if you hadn't said anything I certainly wouldn't have known any different. Hang in there, baby steps.

Ah I've had some reviews like that with my Star Wars fic as my OC main isn't what most people think a Sith should be, which is the whole point. So I tend to simply ignore them. I must be doing something right due to the amount of favs, follows and positive reviews it has.

Not being too familiar with GoT but having someone who's married having a crush on someone who isn't, isn't that hard to believe and age has nothing to do with it.

And I can speak from experience as many moons ago I had a huge crush on a friend of mine who had a boyfriend and she was also a good five years older than me.

So I'm not sure what rock your reviewer has been living under...

Personally, I've since long concluded that the solution to writing problems is what I posted in the start of this thread: Write more. Keep writing, self-edit and re-write.

Gradually one becomes better at it with practice. Not entirely surprising because that seems to be the case with most things. 

Brandon Sanderson was told early in his career by someone that the handful of first books by all authors tend to be crap. The first published book is typically not a writer's first attempt.
His reaction was: "Wow! Cool, I don't have to be good at this!"

My early writing efforts all got burned or torn to pieces for flushing down the toilet. My main surprise is that one can write such garbage  , while also being able to recognize that it is garbage. That is a bit of a paradox.    ...even considering the single malt Isley...

What I regret now, much later, is that I kinda gave up for awhile.
What I tend to do now, is rewriting and rewriting. It helps.

At some point one probably starts to be too self critical and insecure. That's why it also helps to read popular novels on the side. When one starts to feel that highly popular books are more cringe worthy than your own stuff, you are at least managing to do some things right enough.

Only remains a trickier question: Do you write a story that people are interested in reading?  
If you manage to figure out a solution to that one, please tell me. 

Not sure if anyone here is following my Star Wars story but I'm still plugging away at it...

www.fanfiction.net/s/12557605/25/The-Time-Displaced-Sith

Have a humorous or serious encounter between the character and and arms master in which the arms master clues the character in that what he has been calling a long bow all along is really a recurve bowl. 

Actually, this may be a bad idea. It could have been fun, but: Ignore.

"NSA doesn't return calls." appears a weak explanation. Just like with other national agencies, domestic agencies surely have a sort of liasion office to handle such requests and it'd be rather easier to do that than bridge the language barrier, find the right telephone number and not get arrested for unauthorised exchange of data with foreign powers.

It's not about controversial - it's just not very believable.