Recent content by CharlesEBrown

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    How to be funny and still be a good writer?

    His early stuff doesn't quite have the balance his later Discworld books hit. Strata is a science fiction story about people who designed and built a disc world (and even has a variation of the drum gag - one setting has "The Mended Drum" as a bar because "it's hard to beat" the other has "The...
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    Well, I might start posting here after all.

    Fan fiction is where most writers start, though. Some even manage to get into "writing stables" and write the official fan fictions (c.f. the television and movie tie-ins on bookshelves; every Star Trek or Psych or Babylon 5 novel or comic book is fan fiction; there are some exceptions -...
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    Since we're talking about writing experiences...

    Not just authors, but all creative arts. "Popular" is almost always chosen over "good" once money gets involved.
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    "snappy" dialogue...

    I think Amy Paladino may have set the gold standard for snappy dialogue in The Gilmore Girls. I only put it on because it ran before Smallville. I was hooked by (how hot the two female leads were and )how the banter between them felt so natural and yet rapid fire (David Mamet is the only other...
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    Fantasy gambling

    Heh... I have a boardgame called "Unicorn Frenzy" which is a game about betting on unicorn races... The title of the game comes from the fact that unicorns in the back of the "pack" have a tendency to go crazy, and "frenzy" which can throw them in the lead or disable them or do other weird...
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    Fantasy gambling

    The bored rich people in my fantasy settings tend to scry on adventuring companies and bet on the outcomes of their adventures... sometimes on individual encounters, sometimes on their fate within a given dungeon. And sometimes, when they bet against a party, they stack the deck by hiring...
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    How to be funny and still be a good writer?

    What "kind" of funny are you aiming for here? Surrealist humor? Read authors like Eugene Ionesco (especially if you can read them in his native French, though most translations I've seen do him justice), Harold Pinter (primary inspiration for the Monty Pythons), Douglas Adams (the Dirk Gently...
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    Is It Just Me?

    Such a legend that he expanded my knowledge of the character "Ultraman" (and probably watched it on the same channel I did as a kid), and had a character named after him shortly after his passing (Naomi McDuffie, of the comic book series and the CW television show Naomi) Oh, and this tidbit:
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    Is It Just Me?

    The sadly departed Dwayne McDuffie was one of the guys who proposed the Milestone universe to Warner Communications (he'd been trying to work on something like it on his own, and made enough inroads to be offered a few writing gigs and taken seriously - I THINK I have an ashcan version of a...
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    Readers are Hiding From Authors

    Can you blame them? We authors can be a scary, needy lot, after all...
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    Anyone has tips on fantasy eco?

    That sounds a lot (except the tech level was ... strange... some stuff was 1920s era, some stuff barely feudal) like the setting for West End's old Bloodshadows RPG. There even was some fiction set there (have a short story collection somewhere around here and there was at least one novel) that...
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    Appetite for contemporary fiction?

    Well... my one that adds in superheroes and gender bender has all of that too, I think (well, not sure of the comedy going THAT far) and was fairly successful, until life made me put it on hiatus. My two that don't have gender bender never really caught on but didn't do too poorly either (both...
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    Is It Just Me?

    Can't believe I forgot to mention him in some way - he was the first black superhero I ever encountered (in a French language Captain America book dad picked up on a trip to Montreal), and was about my third favorite Marvel character (behind Hawkeye and Spider-man at the time - Nightcrawler and...
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    Multi-pov series synopsis. To name characters or to not name characters?

    The only multiple POV story I attempted was a horror story with each chapter "titled" by the name of the character narrating it. Every character got at least one chapter (most had two or three).
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    Appetite for contemporary fiction?

    As long as it falls into one of the other niches as well. Comedy Slice-of-Life Gender Bender Smut.
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