Recent content by crbrearley

I don't have any tips I can only say that if you keep writing, you'll get better and probably cross the boundary sooner or later. You might try what (I think at least) Stephen King does: Just write the story and see where it all goes. Lots of folks plot things out, but some writers simply...

For the Sable Valiant series, I wrote 500,000 words of background material about the Higher Planes. Or rather, I wrote the background and said, I really should write something with all this material. Curious as to how much I'll use.

I'm not personally excited by the relative morality takes--I've never found that philosophy a great position. "Oh, the Nazis feel the Jews are evil, so it's OK, carry on your genocide." Mind you, the best philosophy may have to offer is "pain good, pleasure bad." So maybe that's not such a big...

Crikey, when I tried to find which anime had the quote "the only thing young people are good for is their unjustified self-confidence"--perhaps my favorite anime quote--Chatgpt keeps giving me a different anime. Specifically, two I've never watched. Can't remember where I heard the quote.

At the risk of turning this thread useful, I suppose you could say that living humans act "out of character" all the time, because mood. Written characters much less so and usually the author must provide justification or the audience growls... I suppose a good writer would have no problem...

I'd still read the Destroyer I think? I'd roll my eyes at some of the political commentary which would be dated anyway. I'd avoid everything else. I never got into Hardy Boys o Horse Clans. I, too, read the Gor novels. There wasn't a lot of fantasy back then and the first five books or so...

Word quota is best. Second would be time quota. Stare at the blank page for an hour or write for an hour, whichever. If you get stuck, go on to a part of the story you think will happen latter and work backwards when you're done. God, this is all very easy to say but not so easy to do.

I can go into extremely dark parts of my mind and clinically take anything awful out of there. If you ask me to follow a creative logic chain, I don't seem to mind that it ends someplace genuinely awful. And that other people might see that as a perversion or disturbing. The lesson I've...

Ah, you see, I did not know that would happen. I just saw everyone had the same format so I figured I better too. I still had some indentations so I don't think the program is perfect.

I became pretty biased in favor of female characters a long,long time ago--and so harems appeal to me provided the women in the harem are interesting and fun. Also, I'd prefer a very logical harem. Probably the best I saw in anime was Campione! where the MC was the grandson of an infamous...

When I came back to writing, I edited every book in my 5 book series. Then, I began writing a third volume I inserted. I think I had a 5K day. I would simply come home and write till I went to sleep. And I hurt myself. Basically, I gave myself some kind of nerve injury and I couldn't type...

I personally write in Word and go through the annoying process of removing tabs that I wrote decades ago. I wasn't aware anyone used tabs on Scribblehub; every book I saw did not. So I figured I'd better follow suit.

I can only write in first person so the choice is made for me. It helps that I prefer reading first person. As to why I love it, well, I like the idea that first person narrators lie and deceive and of course are sometimes wrong. So for the reader it adds an element of "can I trust this...

I think isekai are fine, I just don't want to write one. You should have fun writing. I strongly considered writing a smut story. Hilarously, one of my children of Adam and Eve versions had the women in the family as prostitutes because Adam cursed them by calling them "a pack of whores" and...

I think Ray Bradbury himself said that he thought you had to write millions of words before you actually learned to write: that quantity was the secret to quality. It's a long trip. It's the kind of thing that anyone can get better at but not everyone will (because they tend to give up early)...