English blog ⁽²³⁾

I wonder if anyone is interested in joining a mailing list where I sometimes put out some things. It will be a very low volume mailing list, often pointing to new posts on the site. Lately I've found Facebook to be very limiting in reaching readers. Only when I donate significant amounts of dollars or euros to them, will they make my posts there be seen by more than 5 to 10 people, which is a bit disappointing. So, if…

Yes, I've been very quiet here for the last few days. Weeks. Okay, months. I've also been very busy with lots of things. One of them is "work", that hobby which eats up so much time. Next to that, I acquired a new hobby. It looks like a harp, sounds like a harp and... yes, is a harp. Nera was very helpful in making this a short video... In writing parts, there is some progress too. I've dug up an…

As things happen, I came up with a new witch. This happened by accident, as I was looking at covers for stories. As with "Clara's Eyes", I saw a cover and I had to have it. I had no story yet, but that was also the case with Clara's Eyes, and I think that came out as a great story. I'm not sure how this new witch will work out. Will it become a series as long as Hilda's? Who…

Dear reader. A while ago I started drawing. It's been about 3 or 4 weeks now. I'm not yet good at it, but you have to start somewhere, right? One of the characters I came up with is Hexia. A young witch. Of course, a bunch of ideas came up, and I started writing. I got up to some 800 words now, and I want to share them here. I wonder what you think of this start. And here is…

Welcome to part 2 of this blog set about Manuskript. In case you missed part 1, it's here. We saw how to create a new story, and we viewed a bit of the outline and the editor. If we open the Summary option, we see this: I already entered a Situation, to make it a bit more 'alive'. At this point, we can write a one sentence summary of the story. The basic ingredient. We're not restricted to one line, but…

Manuskript. Most people don't know it. It's software for writers. Software with lots of options, while being a lot simpler than Scrivener. I know loads of authors live inside Scrivener, and hooray for them, but it's too much, big, complex, confusing for me. Read about Manuskript etc at their homepage. There are screenshots and a list of features. This post, and perhaps another one, will go into how I use it, to give you an idea. Note: Manuskript is Free…

You may have noticed the extra menu item at the top of the site. "My Bookshop". Yes, I set one up. It doesn't have all the books yet, because getting that in place is a lot of work. Buying from that bookshop circumvents the big players like Amazon, Google, Kobo etc, which leaves a little more revenue per sale for me. Well, except for the free ones, of course. The shop carried "EPUB" files, the type that is not 1…

It's really happening. The writing stuff is done. The creation of the cover is underway. To give you an idea how it will look: This story will serve up plenty of action, adventure, magic, fun and surprises. I hope you will like it when it's available. The 'some picture' should be done towards the end of this month, after which I can create the final view, and get to work on getting the book out for you!

I was curious about the translation capabilities of Google Translate versus Deepl when it comes to prose. Prose is harder than non-fiction. I both fed them the same snippet from the start of my Dutch book "Windjammer." In the below table I'm marking the most interesting differences and bits going wrong. DEEPL GOOGLE TRANSLATE "Hey, Kep!" William Belly roared as loud as he could. The captain was idiotically busy but this was important. He had discovered a tear in one…

Did you ever wonder where 'crappedy crap' came from? People who are familiar with the Hilda-books, must have come across that expression. Most people have a stop-word, or some kind of default expression. Some people use the (in)famous "F-word", which should not be named, but which is liberally used all over the world, including songs. Others use 'crap' or other words. I like 'crap', but a wicked witch would never settle for something short like that. For that reason, I…