Recent content by big soft moose

We get AI members time to time, they are very easy to spot and get banned on sight. They’re usually setting up an account as a precursor to some kind of scam

the most valuable purpose of beta readers is to tell you what your audience will think of your book. Unless you are writing for an audience of computers AI can’t do that. It can do minor editing and proof reading but you have to watch out for stupid things that change the sense of your writing...

We had a thing at work last week where a guy used co pilot to write a complaint to the boss about a health and safety matter. Unfortunately it completely screwed the pooch cites several pieces of US legislation, one from Australia, and misconstrued the UK legislation it did cite. It was my...

I can’t remember, it might have been girlwriter or that may have been a different mulltiple sock puppet incident There been so many they blur after a while

We had a woman once who created 4 duplicate accounts so they could have a conversation about how great her competition entry was She then claimed they were her friends who’d joined to support her until we pointed out that they were using one computer and two of the email addresses were only...

Strikes me that he didn’t think either of you were joking. That said if I was your manager I’d be more concerned that you have so little work to do that you are looking around about nail clippings

That’s why we were getting server errors thinking about it, the code for the notification wasn’t able to cope with the field being blank If we want to avoid saying it twice we could change the header to just a logo

we can't easily but there are browesers and apps that allow readers greater customisation at their end

King Rat by James Clavell is also an interesting example in the show vs tell... 99% of the first chapter is pure teling exposition giving the reader an overview of the law out of changi... he could have doine it through showing in later chapters instead but it would have slowed the story down...

they'e really not, but i CBA to pursue this daft argument... as to the purple not purple thing, i'm going to trust that John Sandford with his multibook big five deal, 30+ best selling novels, and the pulitzer prize under his real name John Camp knows how to write...

if for example you inform the reader that Moonlight glinted on the broken glass around the corpse , blood spatters black rorsatches of violent death ( John Sanford) Then the reader can infer that someone has died that it was bloody, and that the body has been found during the night …they can...

My point is that to show you do need to know, if you don’t know you can’t infer and thus nothing is being shown.

But there does have to be enough information to infer from Unless it’s a high lit project where the lack of certainty of what is happening is part of the art

Well no Show works by providing the reader with context to infer not baldly stating a conclusion ( telling via dialogue) then throwing in ambiguous direction For example Bob looked closely at the wounds on Dave’s arms they were ragged at the edges as if clawed by a big cat. He sniffed the...

The thing is it doesnt, he could be looking at Jane to see if she shares his conclusion, or because he’s a dirty old letch, or to see if she’s brought him a sandwich