Recent content by The Dark One

I should add, I never referred to her as a druid (quite deliberately). He made his own connection.

As I've said before, I don't write fantasy but I do write historical and speculative fiction. Even one of my crime novels has a decent spec fiction aspect to it (set in 2030). Historical does take a massive amount of research and no matter how hard you try you won't satisfy everyone. My only...

I doubt whether a legit film rights buyer would give up easily. And the reality is, most (not all, I grant you) writers whose books are pursued for film rights will have agents.

If you get an email you weren't expecting regarding your work... No matter how exciting, 999 times out of a thousand, it's a scam.

Well done MS. It's always exciting having a new book on the shelves and that's a very decent print run. My biggest was 5k (and there was no second run). Grrrr....

I get heaps of scam emails - mainly about wanting to help me market my work. I always delete immediately. A writer friend stupidly got drawn in and paid a thousand dollars for marketing services which never happened. The really insidious aspect of these emails is that they use AI to scrape...

When does sarcasm become just being an arse? When it's not funny.

Never forget that it is part of a writer's duty (I believe) to be educative. Where else do we learn new words but in books. Unless it's totally out of character/context revel in your sesquipedalian prolixity.

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...