Recent content by Mad Swede

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...

OK skip.knox I'll try to illustrate what I mean by the difference between translation and interpretation as a reply to you and MSadiq in our quest for style, rythm and form :) This is one situation where English doesn't really cut the mustard. In Swedish you'd say "nära döding" to mean a...

Kennings aren't much used in modern Swedish, but do occur in older prose, especially poetry and folk tales. You'd use kennings to keep a rythm as you told the tale to your listeners. My grandmother often used them when she told me folk tales. Nicknaming is alive and well over here, and someone...

But I'm asking you. And no you don't have to answer, but that in itself would also be an answer...

Yes, I got that when I read it. That's what I'm trying to say, if you haven't seen the combinations of jewelry and clothing you get in your part of the world then you might not understand how there can be a sort of distance between neck and necklace. It's really hard to explain.

I recognise that. I'd interpret haybah as vördnad if I was translating into Swedish, and I'd be using the word vördnad in it's fullest sense. But there's no way I could easily translate it into English without losing some of that sense of awe which vördnad and haybah convey.

Ah, this is the beauty of jewelry combined with clothing from those parts of the world. It is stunning, and yes it does give the sense or impression of a mirage.

If you lived there that long I have to ask why you think MSadiq needs to change his prose style? Sure, you could write it all in a western style, but what is wrong with taking the reader away into the setting using a different prose style? Challenge them, engage them, draw them in. Yes, as a...

There's nothing worse than a lazy translation which loses the meaning and sense of the original prose. That's why a good translation is more an interpretation of the original than an exact translation.

We'd write something similar in Swedish, so I don't have a problem with the original wording. Now I'm going to be a bit critical. I've served in the Middle East, and I understand MSadiq's metaphor exactly. But to understand it you need to have seen non-western jewelry worn with non-western...

It's in your style, in the same way that I (as a Swede) write English prose in a style which derives from my native language. I shouldn't worry about it, just write and see where it takes you.