Recent content by The Dark One

I don't think there was anything in MS's post regarding your intelligence. It was simply a caution against relying on youtube for fast research.

I tend to agree with MS quite a lot, I've noticed, though I probably would have found a way to say the above a little less confrontingly. That said, it's an important lesson. Quality writing - my definition of quality meaning: writing that is worth reading, on any level - must come from a...

And you're missing my point that getting a name from any machine or any sort of prepared list is not invention. At the very least it's lazy. I'm probably more a purist than some but for me names are forged in the moment the character is invented - and a named/speaking character always has some...

I do it a lot but I have read very extensively in the relevant cultures and have visited the relevant countries with my ears very much open. If you do it, you have to KNOW you've got it right. Otherwise you might look a right muppet.

Pretty sure if I'd published a story with a character called Arklblargh that I'd be pissed off if someone scraped with AI and used it. Sorry, but I get very, very upset at anyone calling themselves an author if they use AI for anything regarding story generation. Not only are you creatively...

Yep, works for me.

And yet the real reason was to give the worthy professor (and the reader) something to think about. It was so pathetic DB actually had a super-wealthy organisation whose sole purpose was to stage "events" to hoodwink the prof into getting the wrong idea - a sort of pre-loaded deus ex machina...

All my books are humorous but the humour tends to be situational / character driven so it's difficult to give a sense of why something is funny just from a short extract. Here's one of the bits that often got quoted by reviewers ... for context, our hero is a lawyer and a bit of a scumbag. The...

Not the same but similar... Something that annoyed the crap out of me a few years ago was reading Dan Brown's Inferno. It was a pretty terrible book, frankly, but one of its most annoying characteristics was the bizarre tendency of the evil guy to leave interesting clues for the protagonist to...

I was just about to say exactly that.

You have terrible feelings of inadequacy and feel guilty for cheating. You need to find a way to break the cycle...

Porked? That takes me back...

Why not just write what you want and worry about its classification later?

I guess the other part of this is that we are able to recognise traits in others that we do not share ourselves (even if, in an id state, we recognise the attraction of such motivations. Run up the Jolly Roger lads!!!

Writers discuss this a lot. My view is that any invention which comes from my mind is not necessarily me but must be a figment of how I perceive the world/human nature etc. The MC in my most popular book is a very naughty lawyer who takes drugs, drinks a lot, sneers at just about everyone and...