Shameless Plug - My New Novel
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I've gathered enough details to put a page up for the fourth entry in my series, now titled "Mercenary Ascent." I also named the fifth book, "Mercenary Justice." There's a page for that one, but I don't know how to summarize it in a non-spoiler way so I doubt I'll put anything there until the fourth one is released.
https://www.tjmott.com/works/the-thaddeus-marcell-chronicles/mercenary-justice/
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Some musings about themes, and the most common criticism I receive about my first novel:
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And some of the funny (invalid, IMO) criticisms I've received that I'm not going to blog about because it's not my role to attack my readers, but it fits on this site because we're all dickweeds. All of this is regarding the first novel only.
- The story was too long.
- The story was too short.
- The story was too focused, with lots of unexplored territory that could have added a lot.
- The story was too scatter-brained with lots of irrelevant and distracting things.
- The story moved too quickly, there was no time for the reader to breathe between action sequences.
- The story was slow, took forever to develop, and was plodding and boring without enough interesting things happening.
- The story set up some very interesting side plots. But it ended without resolving any of them! It's like the writer started a story and just didn't finish it! (Um, read the title, it's book 1 of a series...those things are setup for the sequels and they're resolved later)
They sound just like users.
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@mott555 said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
They sound just like users.
Well... They (try to) use your book for entertainment, so in a way they are users.
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FYI my two new short stories are currently free on the US and UK Kindle Stores, up through December 5:
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Here's a self-submitted interview with Interviews With Writers:
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Got me some cool new artwork for the next installment. I really like my artist's work.
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@mott555 That the 6'4 gal you talked of in the other thread? Poor little fella next to her has a lot to think about
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@Applied-Mediocrity Yep, she finally has a face.
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@mott555 The fancy dressed guy on the left looks a bit out of place
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@hungrier That's the point. That character is a bit flamboyant and full of himself...
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@mott555 I thought it was one of the Beatles.
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@Zecc
Can't be there is no yellow submarine or walrus
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@Luhmann said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
@Zecc
Can't be there is no yellow submarine or walrusThat happens in Book 5.
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@mott555 Which one?
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@Mason_Wheeler yes.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
Poor little fella next to her has a lot to think about
Hard to say whether they're a lot or not. They're a lot more covered up than in a lot of SciFi art.
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One of my short stories (Kindle ebook only) is on sale this week. The other one will be on sale next week. They're both brief origin stories for two of my main characters.
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A wild blog post appears!
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@mott555 You haven't logged in for some time, but maybe you're not gone forever? Another thread reminded me, I just finished your second book, and liked it much more than the first one. It felt like characters were indeed getting a bit more complex and interesting.
Although I guess Marcell felt a bit too much like some sort of Über-angst-teen at some points (he has some good reasons to feel conflicted, but it feels a bit turned to 11 at times), and some of the plot lines were a bit too obvious (the romance sub-plot is a bit hamfisted, for example). I also get that you have to build your universe somehow (probably in preparation of future books?), but there are a couple of chapters that are totally disconnected from the rest (the sabotage mission), and it's also obvious that the new squadron-in-training is somehow going to link back to the main story, but it still feels a bit too disjointed from the main story initially.
Still, a very enjoyable read, I'm looking forward to reading the next one (I have them on my phone and I get even less reading time there than on other medium, but I'll get to it... one day...).
I spotted a couple of typos but somehow today I can't get them out of my Kindle app, so that'll be for later (I think you did the rein/reign mistake at least once ).
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I'm about a month late, but another wild blog post appeared!
Here's hoping he hasn't forgotten us...
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... Writing Program.
Bahahahaha. None escape.
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@TwelveBaud does that mean .Net is finally usable for GUI outside Windows!?
For the rich text editor, I selected Quill, which is a browser-based JavaScript editor.
God fucking dammit.
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@Gustav Quill actually makes some sense though because it doesn't just take a div, slap contenteditable on it and trust the browser to get its shit straight, it actually does some processing around it to ensure you always get a logically consistent set of nested tags (something even Word internally will fuck up regularly enough, and something that contenteditable/most WYSIWYG solutions won't sanitise away)
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@Arantor I'm just sad that every GUI framework other than HTML engines is effectively abandoned.
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@Arantor said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
Quill actually makes some sense though
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@Gustav Given his requirements - cross platform and stable + sane API for WYSIWYG - that seems like a reasonable compromise to get something working in a sensible amount of time + effort.
I literally work as a web dev and am dismayed to see that the clusterfuck that is web is being accepted as the one true environment, because it's legitimately fucking awful.
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@Applied-Mediocrity no, not really. This is one reason I picked up PureBasic and am currently getting reacquainted with bits of the WinAPI I last touched in 2000. Shit gotten more real yet.
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@Arantor I lost you at PureBasic.
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@Gustav It might be a Basic dialect but it compiles to native executables with no external DLLs and NO FUCKING WEB BROWSER CORE.
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@Arantor just like Rust! You could be using Rust.
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@Gustav For writing a GUI app that spends most of its time interacting with the WinAPI? I could learn how Rust does FFI to that, or I could just use a language that has high level abstractions that makes it less painful.
There are things I'd consider writing in Rust, but not this one. It doesn't benefit from being in a lower-level language.
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@Arantor until recently I'd have said fair enough... Today it's more like, you do you.
(And WinAPI is not a problem at all, there's ready-made library with all the bindings as well as a tool for turning any C header into bindings.)
(Also I question your decision to do GUI for Windows-only program in anything other than C# and WPF.)
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@Gustav doing a smaller project that's WinAPI heavy, before I experiment on something bigger that will be cross-platform and less specific to WinAPI.
Dunno about you but I prefer slightly smaller projects to try out new languages and environments, and I don't feel like trying to expand my knowledge of Rust to GUI stuff... it's fine for the command line tools I've written though.
I just wanted a palate cleanser away from PHP/JS/etc. but I appreciate being judged for more of my poor life choices.
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@Arantor said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
I appreciate being judged for more of my poor life choices.
Like posting on TDWTF?
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@HardwareGeek exactly.
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@Gustav said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
@Arantor I lost you at PureBasic.
Well, one being lost does imply this.