Recent content by Slartibartfast

This seems to be an extreme and uncharitable response. I (and others) posted our preferences in response to your question and we have given our reasons - that’s the point of a forum. What with being different people, some of us have different preferences, this should not be a problem. Nobody has...

I wouldn’t say you’re being unclear. I guess I’m just thinking about what I value in my relationship with my editor and you’re doing the same. What I write at the moment is very particular and needs to fill a very specific niche and suit a very specific audience (and has a furious schedule that...

I actively look out for beta readers who have no specific genre knowledge so I appreciate the advantage that this perspective gives. But while that's a useful opinion, I think that an editor is too central to the development of the work to not have any understanding of where it sits within the...

Depending on Ts&Cs you can often get affiliate commission on sales of your own products being sold by another seller which is a nice bonus if you set it up right. My experience of online commerce is that my wife owns an online shop that is secondary to market and show trading. The thing takes...

A good question. Watch how I dodge it. <nerd> The GOT cover I think is truly awful. Back in the day when I learned film photography, that type of graphic was heavily criticised for having neither strong blacks nor whites: This type of image was generally seen as a signature of a photographer...

When I first started I also thought about my projects as being made up of these three things, plus a fourth: the story. The most productive thing for me to do was to open up four documents, one for each of characters, story outline, world, and the story itself. I'd usually have to give myself...

I’ve used Kickstarter as a backer. This was back in the Wild West days when it was more about indies seeking funding and less about large companies using it as a pre-order system. I have seen the following mistakes more than once. Sometimes they led to delays lasting years. Sometimes to huge...

Who?

I agree with some of the other posters that the setting and the time period are not defined and neither are the characters beyond three (very) broad ethnic groups, an unspecified disability, one occupation, two fairytale characters, and a skin tone. Accordingly there is nothing really to...

Guilty (not guilty) pleasures are a long list of 80s and 90s action hits (and misses): Conan, Starship Troopers, Predator, Terminator, Rambo, The Crow etc. ad nauseum. Guitly (ok, maybe a bit guilty) pleasures are some of the weirder, or at least horribly dated, fantasy films from the same era...

I've only published non-fiction and this was so obscure that I didn't bother putting it in KU. However, watching that book get lost in the unfathomable catalogue of Amazon has convinced me that any chance to get some sort of initial foothold has got to be worth it. At something like a million...

Thanks for the encouragement! It certainly is. That's a win in itself, but I think the big takeaway for me is that I can write at the rate of a novella a month while working two jobs. I didn't actually know I could do that before so taking on (and technically failing) this challenge has shown...

27k So quite poorly against the NaNoWriMo target but quite well against a normal month. I'm claiming that as a victory. The month's not over so there will be more, but not 23k more. If only there was a National Novella Writing Month...

Sounds like a fun place to write about. In that case, one other thing to consider (if you like) is not just the availability of a technology, but its scale and application. Barrels are certainly common technology in the early post-medieval period, but their cheap, volume manufacture wasn't...

Just re-read my post and should have been way clearer with what I was trying to say. Firstly, my experience is from Northern Europe and doesn't apply outside of that area. Secondly I was trying to answer the question 'how does someone who already has a water source go about spreading this...