for example instead of having a chapter title or anything, the chapter just starts with a bold capital letter. I'm considering using this form of chapter breaks because my book is fast paced, and has a lot of short chapter, any words of warning when using this? here is a chapter ending and a new one beginning: Griffin looks at me and slowly, clumsily, pulls off his underwear and i notice that he doesn't have a tan line and i begin to wonder why and almost laugh. I wake up sometime before dawn. my mouth is really dry and it hurts to unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth. thank you!
That enlarged capital letter is called an Initial, but different types have different names. One of the most common is a drop cap, in which the initial is top aligned with the top of the remainder of the first line, and the next two or more following lines are indented by the space taken up by the initial. However, this is not something you, as a writer, should be concerned about. This is part of the typesetting for the chapter, and that is a publishing decision, not something that takes place in the manuscript. A chapter always begins on a new page.
It's tricky because generally you would be expected to use a page break between chapters but if you're going for the Less then Zero approach, I can see that it wouldn't be appropriate. I think I would probably use a specific icon other than an asterisk to mark those breaks because those could easily be changed to page breaks by search and replace later if required. Although having said that, there probably isn't any point not using asterisks because you probably won't use small scene breaks anyway, so they wouldn't get mixed up. So I would probably use asterisks to mark the breaks. (If I'm not using them elsewhere.) By the way, you will find it harder to revise and navigate around your MS without standard chapters, so it might be worth installing a few larger "chapter breaks" and then removing them at the end, if the Less than Zero thing works for you. Your question: I don't think they have a specific name as they're not a particularly well-established thing.
If you are using section breaks rather than chapters, you use a single centered # symbol on a line by itself, not three asterisks, in manuscript. In manuscript, chapters always begin on a new page. There is no requirement to break a novel into chapters. Make sure you are doing the writer's job, not the typesetter's work.
