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90% chance that this is a scam. 9% chance this is just an offer to get you into a bad contract. 1% chance it's just a fisher trying to see if you have a live account it can direct future scammers to or if you are an automated uploader. If it weren't in all caps, I wouldn't consider that last...

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...

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 -...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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:

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...

Can you blame them? We authors can be a scary, needy lot, after all...

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...

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...

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...

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).

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

Or maybe the more "successful" authors are just better at marketing - they may have groups they chat with regularly off-site, private message chains somewhere, and other ways of contacting fans and drawing them here to help get their numbers up.

In Leo Frantkowski's The Crosstime Engineer, there was a kind of cool moment where Conrad Stargaard tries to introduce a base ten/metric system to the merchants of medieval Poland, and they instead talk him into a base 12 one, because base 10 can only be broken up into 1s, 2s, 5s and 10s, while...

Yeah, kind of the same here. I got the first one "right" - but both felt off. Got the science one "wrong" probably because the AI passage reads more like the most recent stuff I read from Carl Sagan (his essay on why we will probably never encounter intelligent life in the stars ... despite...

Not only does this happen, it does not happen every time. I'm not sure what causes it. Have had to do a lot of formatting repair between apps.