Recent content by Mad Swede

This first study looks ONLY at self-published books. It's a known fact that those writers who self-publish and who make a living out of it are primarily writers in the Romance genre. Those writers have to produce a new book every 6 to 8 weeks, otherwise readers move on to books by different...

The AI-tool search results should be taken with a very large pinch of salt. In the same way that unscrupulous vanity publishers can rig searches so that their websites appear at the top of the search result list it is possible to tag and in other ways index web pages and parts of web pages such...

Where do I begin? I've spent the last few years in the transport business, and one of things many companies are looking at is the use of so-called AI-tools to make processes and analyses more efficient. But we're not there yet, and that is for several reasons. One major issue is data...

OK, wearing my hat as a retired military police officer. Yes, those companies who have created those AI-tools in the form of Large Language Models have in many cases stolen other peoples intellectual property to build databases with which to develop and "train" the models. Yes, those who did...

You do like to make your own writing life difficult don't you? :) In a high fantasy setting where diagnoses of these sorts don't exist (as would be the case for my dyslexia) the character concerned may not know what is causing their problems. Neither does anyone else. That leads to a very...

Not really. The creativity we authors put in to our stories starts with the outline. That's where we set out the story arcs, the plot, key events, the setting, the characters and their arcs. In doing that (whether we write the outline down or, like me, keep it in our heads) we apply our...

What makes each author unique is their style of writing: the way they express themselves, the words and phrases they choose to use, the way they structure their story. This is something an AI-tool like Claude cannot reproduce, simply because of the way those tools are built. Tools like Claude...

Ah, then your dragon should be hoarding a Dragon 64 computer. Angharad had one, and those things even had (have?) a red dragon logo above the keyboard... Dragon computers look very smilar to a Tandy Color Computer 2, even down to the size, and both types can run the OS/9 operating system if...

And now I'm going to be awkward and ask which version of the TRS 80? Because if the dragon is using a TRS 80 Color Computer then what it really should be using is a Dragon 32 (the Dragon 32/64 a very similar Welsh computer, to the point where the Dragon 32/64 were almost clones of the TRS 80...

You mean the low fantasy book series by Mary Norton: The Borrowers, The Borrowers Afield, The Borrowers Afloat, The Borrowers Aloft, The Borrowers Avenged and the novella Poor Stainless. The first book in the series won the Carnegie Medal. The books themselves are quite complex and deep, with...

I'm not sure you can delay making the choice, at least not if you want to include visual or even physical jokes as part of the story. Visual humour can be exaggerated in its form (anime is - or can be - an example of this) but you can't use that sort of exaggerated humour in the same way in...

No, I can't. I am severely dyslexic and I am not reading or writing in my first language. There are other non-English speakers in this community too. This is why you must take the time to express yourself clearly, that way we can avoid unneccesary misunderstandings and disagreements. This is...

I've said this to you before, I'm sure. This is not about your style of writiing. This is about your writing routines, your method if you like. You must learn to use the right wording, because otherwise people are going to misunderstand you and you won't get the support you need. I know I keep...

I wonder if this is the basic problem with what you're trying to do. You're trying to convey a visual form of storytelling in prose form. So it seems to me that you have a choice. Write a graphic novel, which relies on the graphics to convey some of the emotions and context. Or write a prose...

I wonder if you understand the comment Penpilot made? What you are trying to do is describe a visual joke in prose (text) form. That is extremely difficult, verging on the impossible, simply because the joke is visual and not verbal. What I would suggest is that you try to get the huimour...