Recent content by skip.knox

Starting is the easiest thing in the world; finishing is the hardest. How you get from the one to the other is the deepest of secrets because it's different from one person to the other. It took me close on sixty years to figure it out, and I still can't identify the magic because it seems to be...

>So, which approach would be better? Define "better". More specifically, do you mean which option ought you to choose for your next project? Which option has proved more successful (as counted by books sold)? Which option do I personally prefer? To put it another way, what sort of guidance are...

I have left open the matter of gods. Some of the people of Altearth believe there are gods, much as they do in real Earth. To those people, the gods are real. Altearth dwarves revere ancestors, but they don't "believe in gods" (a slippery phrase if ever there was one). Humans observe proper...

Playing Blue Prince. And yes, I am keeping a notebook.

That's quite a list of cultures there. It's not like they were all the same before they converted to Christianity. And that leaves aside what "converted" would even mean in a particular time and place. As for sources, one of the immediate challenges is that the literary sources we have all date...

It appears that the issues is resolved, as the excerpt appeared in Critique Requests last Saturday.

Yeah, that was my notion as well. But I've listened to Joanna Penn's podcasts before, and then I listened to the first two chapters of the cloned narration, and I gotta say it sounded pretty much dead on. Now, that's the finished product; there's no indication of how much production work it took...

Well, we are not a company, so that's the first thing to clear up. Second is, how long is your short story? Third, I'm not at all sure what you mean by "tried to copy a document" and also what you mean by "it was duplicated". Can you provide more specific information? And third, why do you want...

This is a pretty common difficulty. As A.E. Lowan points out, there nothing like a single Official Way to approach this. The best you can do is to ask questions and realize that the replies are going to vary. Choose whatever resonates with you. My own advice to myself is to get down into the...

I just can't quite do it, because what Amazon's audio AI currently provides just is not there. But Joanna Penn has shown me another way. She is releasing her new novel in audio format. She's employed AI tools to clone her own voice, then provided the text, so that the result is a "self-narrated"...

In what way are you stuck with breaking arcs down into smaller scenes? Is it the breaking down part that is the sticking point, or the writing? It sounds like you *can* write scenes, at least if they are mainly dialog. It always helps me to try to be as specific as possible when I'm wrestling...

I assure you, I'm not hating on Amazon. I have from time to time been critical of Amazon, but mostly I was trying to show that there exist objective reasons for people to be unhappy with the company, which in turn can explain why some folks mistrust the company. That's all.

People will leave only if they can bear the cost of leaving. Some have not reached that point, others have. And Amazon has already made policy changes that some have protested while others have left. It would arguably be better if one behemoth did not exercise so much control over the market...

None with translation, but I'm currently working with audio narration. The AI is surprisingly good, but teeters just short of good enough. It makes odd mistakes, some of the tools are rather clumsy, and there are some features that would move it over into the Genuinely Useful column. I figure...

If you go exclusive with Amazon, then all other options are denied to you as the author. Now, it may be that this is fine, that current practices by Amazon are entirely benign and beneficial to you. That's not the concern I hear most often voiced. The concern is that Amazon might change their...