Recent content by Mad Swede

This is something I don't describe in my stories. That's partly because in a setting where most people can't read or write (or have only limited reading skills) the idea of a calender isn't needed. People will keep a track of the seasons and maybe the number of days (and they might know what a...

No. That's partly because in the sorts of stories I write there isn't much deliberate plotting of that sort, certainly not in the short stories, and because in my experience those sorts of scenes just slow the action down.

To answer your question. No. It's not odd. The only time a character in a book should be an accurate reflection of you is if you write your autobiography. Otherwise the characters in the stories you write should be whatever you as the author want or need them to be. There's no right or wrong...

I guess the real message she is trying to convey is that to convey the theme (or themes) in a work they need to be developed and all sides or aspects about the point being made need to be presented without using strawman arguments. I think my only objection to this is that she is arguing from...

Well, I just (?) write my stories the way I was told stories by my mother and grandmother. Effectively I write my stories using a Swedish style and structure, without really thinking about it. I just tell the story. This is my advice to you, to do the same. Just tell the story the same way you...

I'm going to be a bit controversial here and tell you to ignore the supposed formalised methods and the use of beat sheets. If I were you I'd simply write your story in the sort of style and structure you're used to from home. Tell it like your grandmother would have told you a great story. This...

This thread may help: Descriptions of fight scenes

If you're worried that the summit will lose the readers interest then you need to separate those 8 or 9 chapters with something else. This where I'd ask you what sub-plots you have going on involving other POV characters? Events that happen to these other characters can be used to deepen the...

I'm going to be very very blunt, possibly a bit rude, and get straight to the point. You need to learn basic English grammar. Only proper nouns (the names of people or places, formal titles and formal modes of address) are capitalised. So your stone-blood elves are just that, the king of the...

I wonder how much this depends on why you want to write? Those of us with a compulsion to write, for whatever reason, need no help getting words on the page. What we have to learn is the craft of writing and then apply our own voices to that craft. For us, it's all about writing, not about...

The sort of AI-detection tools used by the main publishers and many agents will detect that you have used ProWritingAid, and they will pick up if you used the AI-tools in Grammarly. And that will get you rejected unless they have stated they acept stories written with the help of AI. I am...

I write using Word, for various reasons. There's no real problem keeping track of versions, I just save the file with a new version number as soon as I start writing. I'm a one pass writer, so what goes down on the first pass is it. That also means the story is in one complete file. I always...

LLMs are sometimes presented as a threat to writers and other artists. But the truth is that they're no better than the texts (or whatever) they were trained on. There's no intelligence in LLMs, no ability to infer and interpret. LLMs just recognise and apply patterns based on the materiel used...

It's very common misconception that editing a story will make it shorter, that somehow all you're doing is paring it down. And it isn't. Editing is about improving a story, and if you ever work with a professional editor you'll learn that the first stages in editing (what's called developmental...

And now I'm going to be really awkward ;) and point out that Layamon was English and not Welsh. Brut is a Middle English poem if I remember correctly and from what my Welsh girlfriend Angharad said it's based indirectly on Gruffudd ap Arthur's book Historia Regum Britanniae (in English...