Recent content by Mad Swede

The closest I ever got to a situation like this was in central Africa. We had to deal with a herd of forest elephants who were living in our operating area. Being briefed by a local expert as we stood by the road watching the herd cross ahead of us is something I'll never forget. It certainly...

Normally I'd expect that to be in the mission brief or maybe the latest intsum, but there's always something they don't tell you...

Writing this as a former brigade commander, you have no idea what it's like to be on the receiving end of a briefing like this. You're standing there thinking "what the f***?" and wondering (a) how you and the brigade are going to deal with this and (b) what the hell you tell divisional HQ.

I think you should read LoTR all the way to the end, as this may make you rethink some of what you wrote. It isn't quite as straight forward as it first seems, not even when it comes to the orcs.

Be honest now. If you or I knew the answers to a question like that we could write a real best-seller on how old wrecks like us find our partners in life.

Not something that ever happens at Swedish book signings. Contrary to popular impressions, Swedish women are fairly shy.

You haven't said how well you know this other language, so it's hard to say how much effort you'd need to put in. I'm fluent in several languages, and I've had my stories translated. One thing I did learn was that it isn't enough to just translate. Sure, you can get software which will do a...

If your story gets published you will be judged. You may not want that, but it will happen. All you can really do is choose whether to read those comments or not. What you never do is reply to them. All writers use experiences from their lives in their writing. Sure, we can do research on...

If you want to call the process by which publisers find a new author and/or book to publish gatekeeping then do so. But in my view that is not gatekeeping, it's a commercial and in the case of literary fiction an artistic decision. If you want to be "traditionally" published you have to play by...

I wonder if you and pmmg haven't missed my point. I wrote that publishing is a form of venture capitalism. And it is. My books are an example. My publisher had never published anything like them, and there was nothing similar being written by any Nordic author or even available in one of the...

I have a sketch map of the setting for my stories, and also sketch maps of some of the towns and places where things happen. This is because I need these to keep things consistent within the stories (distances, relative positions, travel times, etc) and to ensure that the setting is reasonably...

It is, which sometimes makes it very hard to give newcomers the feedback they need about their writing. I sometimes wonder if the growth in social media has made people more vulnerable to scammers. There are so many "influencers" making claims about how people can be successful that people lose...

He said something else too, and that is that the (traditional) publisher must believe they can sell your book otherwise they won't take it on. That's very important, because there are far too many would-be-published-authors who think that publishers have some sort of pact whereby only certain...

Yes, there's a lot of people who need to hear this. The only thing I would say is that the cost of publishing a book (that is, what it costs the publisher) is mostly driven by the size of any print run. Things like editing, setting, cover design etc don't vary as much.

OK, writing this as someone whose books have been translated into another language. To produce a readable book what you need is an interpretation, not a one-to-one translation. That's because you have to deal with things like word play and cultural references (which may be explicit or implicit)...