Everyone is going to say you can't study for it. You absolutely can, but only so far.
There are two books I recommend linked below. Read them and do the tests. One claims to have the rules for the test but it's outdated, don't trust it.
In addition, study basic English grammar. Understand the basic parts of speech, understand that not all languages have the same syntax as English. Maybe study the grammar for a Semitic or Asian language to get an idea of this.
If you're intelligent you should do fine.
https://www.amazon.com/Complete-DLAB-Study-Guide-Practice-ebook/dp/B00KMHFXCQ
https://www.amazon.com/Official-DLAB-Training-Manual-Practice-ebook/dp/B00HUC6RT4
DLAB is horrendous, this guide is quite helpful but it’s just a beast in and of itself. If you don’t score high enough you can retest in 6 months but it’s up to the recruiter as to if they allow you to wait that long. My DEP had a person waiting to retest so it is possible. When I went through (obviously pre plague) we found out our language week 6. You make a list like week 2 of your “top 5” languages which “they match to needs of the Air Force” but most of us think it just goes into a shred box.
I got this book for $5 on Amazon that has what you want. They're short stories made for beginners. First they show you the whole story in Japanese, then the English translation and then it goes over each paragraph explaining all the vocab and grammar. Honestly it's pretty great.
Romance is actually very simple. All romance novels follow a similar formula. To write effective romance, you need to understand two things: romantic story arc, and how to write emotion and conflict.
I’m going to point you to two resources I recommend to all my romance writer clients:
First is a book called Romancing the Beat by Gwen Hayes (a fellow romance editor). It costs less than $6 on Amazon and you can read it cover to cover in less than an hour. RTB will explain the formula for romantic story arc. Once you understand that, you can just plug your chosen setting, characters, etc. into the formula.
The second is Writing With Emotion, Tension, and Conflict: by Cheryl St. John (a romance writer). This book will teach you how to take your emotional conflict to the next level to really gut-punch your readers right in the feels.
Now go wrench some hearts, little fledgling romance writer. You got this. 👊🏼
Don't join the army. Wait 6 months, study this DLAB book and retake the DLAB. If you don't get over a 110 after studying this book, you'd probably have a difficult time studying as a linguist anyways.
Have you read Romancing the Beat? It's very helpful and shows the different stages of the romance. Usually both the hero and the heroine have a problem with love that has kept them from finding anyone. The first 0-15% of the book is set-up for the normal world and everything changes at the inciting incident. You can still have the meet-cute in the set-up but you are showing their normal world. Does that make sense? Here is the book. https://www.amazon.com/Romancing-Beat-Structure-Romance-Kissing-ebook/dp/B01DSJSURY
Depending on your skill level. For beginners though, "Learn German with Stories" series is a fantastic place to start.
You can get it on kindle for cheap, or you can get it on other places for free wink wink
>I also noticed the show scripts are written by an all-woman team.
The showrunner responsible for the first two seasons of the Netflix adaptation (Chris Van Dusen) is male. He is the creator and primary writer for the first two seasons of the show. Jess Brownell will be leading the next two seasons.
Men can write about, and for, women just fine -- there are a lot of male romance authors out there writing under female or genderless pseudonyms because doing so is part of their marketing approach (they sell better). The reverse is also true, women can write men in a way that is completely believable.
Writing is a business as much as it is a craft. It's important for writers to know who they are marketing to, and to write for expectations of that audience. That means market research. That means writing in the correct voice. Hitting the correct beats (romance readers can be ruthless if this particular need isn't met, hence popular primers like this).
If skilled writing feels gendered, then there's a decent chance that it's meant to -- because that's what sells the best to the audience it is intended for.
If you want to do it really crazy you write backwards...backwards! You write it from beginning to end but explain it to interviewers zach galifianakis style like your are deep genius
Seriously tho
writing from the middle is better
I think there’s a book about backwards somewhere too. Especially for stories that are convoluted and you care about maximizing foreshadow and minimizing plot holes
I found this book very helpful: https://www.amazon.com/Romancing-Beat-Structure-Romance-Kissing-ebook/dp/B01DSJSURY
I thought this book series are great.
They are basic enough for you to read through understandably. Every chapter has a section to explain difficult words too. Its about an italian guy who goes thru various german cities (starting with book 1 = berlin) and his experiences and problems. The books aren't super long either.
There's quite a bit of stereotype in there but i think it's ok since it gives you confidence and also gives you a bit of cultural background across germany.
2 things just in case you didn't know:
- Study this book religiously before you take the DLAB. I studied it and got a 114—you need a 110 to pass. It's pretty much the only study guide out there worth a damn.
- You don't get told your language until the end of Boot Camp, so if you're doing this for a specific language (like I am), it's a risk. I'm set to leave w/ the CTI rate in August but I'm still not sure if I'm gonna do it, because if I get assigned something like Persian it's gonna throw off my career goals quite a bit.
I would really appreciate if you could send some study guides my way! Might as well start studying just for fun while I’m getting ready for MEPS! Someone showed me this and I was planning on buying that today to get started. Have you heard of it before?
My favorite Romance writing resource is Gwen Hays Romancing the Beat. It's a very quick read. I'd give even odds that you've already read it, but if you haven't it might be worth flipping through on your vacation. I know you enjoy writing craft books.
u/lamont196 is right on.
DLAB is a made up test to assess your ability to learn a new language. DLPT or OPI is to test out of an actual language - meaning you've rated proficient in Spanish or Russian or whatever language.
DLAB is a crazy test and was pretty challenging for me. I used these two books to prepare for the test. It helps familiarize yourself with the test and gave me confidence going in. The practice tests were very helpful. I'm not great at languages but was able to qualify for Cat 4 languages. Talk to your recruiter and see if it's possible to get the DLAB or DLPT/OPI done before enlisting - it's just one thing you won't have to worry about down the line. Not sure if that's possible for the DLPT or OPI but worth checking.
Oh nice! In California, 4n0x1 Aerospace medical isn’t on the green side unfortunately :(.
The book I used is by Robert J Cunnings. https://www.amazon.com/Official-DLAB-Training-Manual-Practice-ebook/dp/B00HUC6RT4/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Robert+J.+Cunnings&qid=1603549794&refinements=p_n_condition-type%3A6461716011&sr=8-1 Knowing the rules & memorizing them beforehand definitely helped! Good luck on your test btw
https://www.amazon.com/Official-DLAB-Training-Manual-Practice-ebook/dp/B00HUC6RT4
I highly recommend memorizing the rules beforehand as the test is timed. On one portion, the timer ran out before I could answer the last two questions despite me memorizing the rules. >.< Good luck too!!
I just took the DLAB less than a month ago and made relatively high. I used this book off of Amazon, and I would say it helped me out a good bit. It’s $9.99 and gives a very accurate practice test that’s more or less just like the DLAB layout.
After I passed the test and medical, my liaison at MEPS had me list only the two linguist jobs on my sheet because it was more or less a guarantee I would get one of the two since demand is high. I luckily got airborne because I really wanted to be air crew! From my recent experience, if you want to be a linguist and pass the DLAB and medical qualifications, you will get it.
I used this book off of Amazon, and it helped me out a lot. Ended up making a 140.
Have you talked with your university's career center and had them look at your resume? If you remove identifying information, I would can also take a look and can give formatting suggestions if you have already run it by them. Next, I would recommend checking out the following book, I felt it helped me a lot.l in terms of formatting my resume and putting useful information on it.
https://www.amazon.com/Navigating-Path-Industry-Managers-Academics-ebook/dp/B00NABNFVW
Finally, use every part of your network, if you have a friend or classmate who has a job, reach out to them. Even use LinkedIn to cold reach out to people and ask for an informational interview. If you have any professors whom you have a good relationship with, reach out to them and see if they know any alumni who you can talk with. You are doing your best and right now the market is really rough, I hope others can also offer some advice
3 explicit sex scenes out of 40k words would be a pretty standard number of sex scenes for a romance that was not explicitly attempting to hit the Sweet-&-Clean or Christian romance markets.
Romance has to follow a particular story arc from meet cute through to Happily Ever After or Happy For Now. That's it. Everything else—the precise story arc, the amount of sex, the number of side charac ters, the presence of lack of magic, dragons or space ships—is irrelevant to whether or not your story is a romance. You could have written a book about a spacelord dragonrider bear shifter who shoots lasers out of his eyes and spends the entire book with his dick inside your heroine as he battles an army of sentient seahorses, and as long as it goes through the necessary romance beats and the romance arc is the A plot, you'd still have written a romance book.
There are a few places to find out the exact beats that are expected, but nobody lays them out quite as well as Gwen Hayes, and nothing will distill the lessons she teaches you as much as reading a LOT of books in the genre/niche you intend to write in, so you can internalise the wy the beats play out in different stories.
>Is there a list of the top most common tropes in Romance that EVERY romance must have one of?
No, there isn't. You might be confusing tropes with beats? Like the plot points and specific events in a romance to qualify it as a romance. This book breaks down the required scenes in romance really well.
Stuff like this:
>"enemies to friends", "instant love", "fake dating" as well as the popular "portal" trope
definitely isn't required in every single romance novel. Romance is so broad, the most popular tropes are always going to shift according to market demands. It's never stagnant enough to make a definitive list.
Certain subsets of readers will always have their preferences too. Some will only read billionaires but never vampires. Some only want sweet, charming heroes, others only want mafia bosses who kidnap the heroine.
The Official DLAB Training Manual: Study Guide and Practice Test: The Best Tips and Tricks to Raising Your DLAB Score https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HUC6RT4/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_krUqFbYFQ8DDJ
This has helped me loads. Has all the information you’ll need for the DLAB. But if you’re serious about being a linguist, I’d study grammar very seriously, just so you’re well prepared for the DLI.
I just took it this week and got a 114. Just "studied" for a couple of hours the day before the test. I say "studied" but it's really mostly just getting familiar with the test, since you can't really study for it. I read this manual which was actually really helpful, goes over everything on the test, tips, etc.
Yay! Welcome to the land of kissing books!!
Step 1: read romance.
Step 2: read more romance. (Repeat steps 1-2 many, many times)
Step 3: read Gwen Hayes' Romancing the Beat
Step 4: I found A LOT of support about writing and self-publishing from the r/eroticauthors sub. Really generous community with highly practical advice. I highly recommend digging through that sub, especially u/the_gorgon's wonderful posts like this one about research.
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Best of luck!
I just took it last week, got a 107. This book is basically the test.DLAB book Lmk if you have questions
Use this study guide. I got a 108 the first time and a 118 the second time. That study guide was a lifesaver.
As for the ASVAB there’s numerous guides that are helpful. DLAB this is the only one I’ve found that is really worth anything. Nothing can really prepare you for the test but this will at least help you understand the format and way the “puzzles” work.
You might be talking about writing erotic romance? Romance books have a very distinct set of "beats" they need to hit, and I'd highly recommend reading Gwen Hayes' Romancing the Beat to get a decent handle on them. Romance books can have as much or as little sex as you like and at any heat level, but you'll want to find the sort of thing you want to write on Amazon and read a few of those books to get a feel for what reader expectations will be. This applies even if you decide that you don't want to write stories that fit the romance genre and end up writing erotica novels. Find similar books and read them for patterns. If you can't find similar books to what you want to write there is a very high probability that the market for them doesn't exist.
As for the second part, yes, it can work, but you generally want the toxic relationship to be just-or-recently ended, or ending, when the story begins. Readers don't generally want to read about one of the main characters being with someone else, and the dude ending up in the dust would always be a sort of secondary bonus to the HEA/HFN and building relationship of the main couple, in a romance novel (even a filthy, smutty one). The romance arc is always the A plot. A shitty ex can work as a side plot, but my experience is that spending a great deal of story time on the emotional dynamic between one of the main characters and a side character doesn't work well.
Hope that helps!