Recent content by Mad Swede

Yes, holding back on the sex is an option, even in a story written in that style. Good examples would be Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Hammett in particular has a focus on some fairly nasty aspects of life as seen by a private detective, and his stories don't always have a happy ending...

Seriously? It just happened. I didn't start out with that intention, I wanted to write standalone books. I tried to make the stories standalone. But still my readers think of the stories as a series, to be read in a certain order. And they keep asking when the next in the series is due. In some...

I wonder if you're not overthinking this. Maybe that is simply the way you write. There is this image of writers as people who sit down and write, inspired by whatever muse they have, driven to finish the latest story as midnight approaches. As though what we do is easy, and just comes to us...

As others have written, use a fade to black when it comes to sex. That's what I do and it works fairly well, most readers can picture these things for themselves. As for relationships, I take it you have friends and have (or have had) work colleagues? I'd suggest thinking about what makes those...

No. A drover is someone who drives livestock to market. It's an English term, and it is closely connected with the term "grazier". A grazier is a farmer who specialises in fattening sheep and cattle for market.

For me the characters all feel alive from the start. Maybe it's the way I write, but I never worry about getting them right and I never feel I have to change how I write them. They're just there, in my head, ready to go, and all I seem to do is put it all down on paper.

Yes, such people do exist in my setting. But they're not on what you might call the periphery of society, they're an accepted part of a society where winters can be long and hard. In that sense these characters build on the real life travelling market sellers (so-called knallar) we have here...

I've mentioned this book before here on the forums, but the book the made the biggest impact on me was Astrid Lindgren's Bröderna Lejonhjärta (in English, The Brothers Lionheart). Even now, nearly fifty years after I first read the book, it still moves me. For a childrens book it really is...

Yes, I am a published writer in Sweden and not with any of the sk hybridförlagen. No I'm not going to tell you my pen name or real name, I'll let you work that out yourself... I and my publisher are currently negotiating a publication deal with one of the English language publishers but as...

I did write the origins of the world story/legend for my setting but it hasn't appeared or been mentioned in any of the books yet because it hasn't been needed for the story.

The setting most of my stories are based in went through a civil war a few years prior to the stories happening. That's more than apocalyptic enough when you think through the consequnces for people as individuals and for the country as a whole, particularly if, like me, you've served on...

My point is that there is no real need to risk offending readers. Sometimes implying something about someone or some situation or event is far more effective than writing a detailed description. Our readers usually have quite active imaginations, they can picture the scene and turn themselves on...

OMG. For me this illustrates everything that is wrong with so many stories written by men. For starters, it isn't realistic. Trust me when I write (from personal experience) that when you come into a room and a situation like that you aren't looking at their tits or their hips. You're watching...

If you want a safe way to describe these things then DON'T objectify characters in your stories. That means treating your characters as people, not as a tool or toy, as if they had no feelings, opinions, or rights of their own. It means not demeaning characters by having them judged by the size...

To me you're starting at the wrong end, and I would never describe a woman in that way. When I wrote that I thought through the story and the characters in some detail I meant it. The thing is that the back story for a character will define what some of they look like, be that thin, fat...