Getting your books pirated can be the best thing to ever happen to you in a particular market. Like what happened to Neil Gaiman:

Just what the title says, Chris Fox on boredom, and how to use it to be a more productive writer.

Here’s a story for you:

Alice in Wonderland was morphed into a morphine addict and transported into the 1990’s in “The Cheshire” by Bill Kte’pi.

Then singer Michelle Dockrey read the story, and made a song out of it.

All of them are recognizably Alice. None of them infringe on any copyrights.

Oh, and here’s the song:

Seriously, watch this before you attempt to write anything set in WWI.

The title says it all. From Military SF writer Rick Partlow.

In 2007, Terry Pratchett (and if you haven’t heard of Terry, you really have no business calling yourself a fantasy reader) was diagnosed with PCA, a form of Alzheimer’s disease. He was 59 years old at the time, making it an early onset dementia.

Choosing to battle it, he made a public announcement a few months later, and agreed to have a BBC camera crew follow him every day for a year to show how living with Alzheimer’s could be.

Here’s the first part of the documentary:

Great article from Tim Grahl of Booklaunch.com on how we view piracy, especially ebook piracy, in the wrong way.

It’s summed up nicely in this quote by Tim O’Reilly is the founder of O’Reilly Media:

“The problem with writers isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. It may be hard to monetize fame, but it is impossible to monetize obscurity.”

Read the entire thing here: Ebook Piracy = Sell More Books by Tim Grahl

Chris Fox on using character tags. If you don’t know what they are, watch, and your writing will improve by leaps and bounds.

I’ve been flipp-flopping between being AI-positive, like Joanna Penn, and a complete AI-alarmist, depending on whether I’m thinking about this when the sun’s up or at 3am when I can’t sleep.

On one hand, AI is cool, ChatGPT is fun to play with, and Midjourney is amazing.

On the other, I’m a writer, and reading the news, you’d think ChatGPT is about to do with creative wordsmiths what Microsoft Excel did to accountants in the 1980’s and 90’s: slaughter us wholesale.

Then I read Ted Chiang’s thoughts on the matter. (more…)

I have a confession to make: I don’t like editing.

Writing is fun. Editing is a chore. Not only is it a slow slogg, you have to be ever-vigilant and outright meticulous, both things that I don’t enjoy when reading.

So when I played around with ChatGPT (admit it, you’ve done it too!), on a whim, I asked it what the word “crudmunching” meant in the text I’d fed it. And to tell the truth, ChatGPT’s answer blew me away. (more…)