Recent content by Stepgingerly

No Amon Sul from you! I, on the other hand, need to go back through my first book scattering little bits of ruined stuff all over my world after deciding that, to fix a plot hole, I needed a war to have happened about 75 years previously.

I thought it would be funny and went to Amazon to find that author. Some of the books that came up though... 🤣

I'm sure she was being kind, and it was a good lesson for me because two of the other critique group folks had been shredding the piece I shared. There is such a thing as taste, and what one group adores, another despises. The hardest part of this process seems to be finding one's audience.

I once had a person in a writing critique group tell me that my writing reminded her of her favorite author, Patrick Rothfuss. It was a super compliment, so I went and purchased Name of the Wind to finally read it. I could only get half way through the first book because the writing bogged me...

I think this might work for a very short piece, but the entire time reading it, I was waiting to hear who the subject was. Anything longer than this would turn me off as a reader. It's just so passive voice, with no concrete subject doing the verbs, that I would get annoyed pretty quick.

Take inspiration from the wild? Newborn giraffes can stand up and run within an hour of being born. Why not your super soldiers?

I would think that a conversation of that nature would be completely authentic in its awkwardness. What that looks like would depend on the personalities involved.

ChatGPT launches boom in AI-written e-books on Amazon Apparently the future is now. Excuse me while I go cry a little.

My books (looking for an agent: working title Resonance!) have a very similar magic system using music. I kept narrowing the scope until the limitations made it interesting. There are definitely many ways to go with this and worlds to build.

I feel like this is all over YA fantasy. Anything with the fae, even Dresden Files, tackles this a bit. The Iron King books by Kagawa. All of the lovely trashy werewolf books lean on this too heavily ("bonding" as in the "Dark Hunter" books by Kenyon). Or some books where magic manifests at...

Considering my username, you're safe from adverbial criticism for the time being. 😉

More worrying to me is that this is likely in response to the book bans taking off in Florida and elsewhere. If books have nothing objectionable, they will stay on the shelves of schools. Every book will have a modern gray-beige cover and matching text so as not to offend or challenge the...

Yet the very act of writing a logical argument in a logical structure forces critical thinking. If AI gives the structure and logic, my students will be brain-dead. "Writing is thinking" and "writing across the curriculum" have been core tenets of an excellent education for a reason. While I...

We have this. https://openai-openai-detector.hf.space/ It works pretty well until the smarter students use chat-gpt as a draft and then edit themselves in. I can't confront a student when the detector says 50% chance of it being AI.

40k into my first book, I realized that I'd written my characters into a corner that would not allow the ending I wanted. Even though I scrapped it to start over, it was useful to solidify my characters' motivations and to just get my head wrapped around writing a full-length book. Since then...