So, I’m going to board the hype train. But not as a passenger. As the driver! Think about it. Who better to write a book on AI than a diehard curmudgeonly tech-savvy skeptic who treats this whole thing as one big conditioning experiment? Exactly. No one. Now, the topic. Ethics, of course. What else is there.
Well, well, that was quick. Three months, done. Now, let me throw some lovely statistics at ya. Book length? About 80,000 words, give or take a few, thirty-five images, thirty-three tables, a combat simulation (written in octave). Study material? I read about 150 books, and about thrice as many reports, journals, monographs, and webpages in six languages. I marked about 800 annotations, and ended up with slightly under 700 citations and references. And the genre?
A couple of months back, I finished writing my brand new-old fantasy book. A fresh, third attempt at an old idea. Why, you may ask. Well, the old one just wasn’t good enough. Despite its verbosity, almost three quarters of a million words, it was clunky, ponderous, perhaps even boring. And reading, I was quite surprised, and delighted, by how much my writing style has changed over the years, and decades. This got me wondering. How many words does it take for one to find their “true” voice?
Between 1997 and 2001, throughout my military service, I wrote my first proper fantasy book. It was a hefty effort, 630,000 words in total. The book had everything: magic, monsters, lore, epicness, colorful protagonists. Only I never published it. Simply put, I tried sending it to various agents and publication houses, and they all turned it down. Rightfully so, because it wasn’t very good. In fact, it was pretty bad.
Readers of mine, welcome. I think I’ve just broken a personal best when it comes to finishing a book. The previous record stood at 34 days for Prince Dietrich, the first volume that is. Now, I’ve managed an even better lap time. Just ten merry days of writing.
Storytelling is universal. From Ancient Greece via medieval Italy to modern-day world, the fundamental formula that makes or breaks any story, EVERY story, be it in written form, on-stage play, or a movie production remains unchanged. Well, it’s one ingredient only: conflict.
Ah, this is the question that every author has asked themselves, at some point in their career. Now, I personally believe that one should not write books for money – as opposed to getting paid to write, ’tis a subtle difference. One should write with love and passion, and if a work makes it into the big beyond, then it’s a nice bonus. A really nice bonus. Now, regardless of what your motives are, the question remains. And the answer is: no, of course not, don’t be silly.
Ladies, gentlemen, swoon not. For what I’m about to tell you will make you … swoon. I am starting the publication process of the second book in the most wittily and elegantly named fantasy series of all times, Woes & Hose. Our beloved anti-hero is coming back in The Glorious Adventures of Glamorous Prince Dietrich!
Normally, I don’t do big annual summaries, but then, this year, I felt it actually might be a useful exercise. Sort of recap what I did, what I wrote, what got published and where. If you’re a numberophil, this little article ought to be interesting.
It’s been roughly six years since I published my first paperback – The Betrayed. Although I’ve published books before (technical stuff) in digital format, my official entry into the world of independent authoring, the way people perceive it, started in 2012.
In the past six years, I had a chance to release seven novels, with another five books, bearing my name out either as a primary author or a co-author, also seeing the light of the day in that same period. A nice dozen. That’s a sizable volume of publications, and I believe I can share some of the lessons and insights I’ve learned since.
