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Sera

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  1. I can't speak about self-publishing. It's harder to see through it: how exactly it's being marketed, which strategies are successful, what sort of content has higher chances of succeeding. If the context (national market preferences, publisher quality, editors availability) plays a big role in traditional publishing, it weights even more in self-publishing. I can say that right now my country has an underdeveloped ebook market. Self-publishing in my native language first wouldn't help at all. You have a better idea of what works in your country, how self-publishing fares there and everything than all of us. Only you can decide the best strategy. Don't forget you can build a fan base in another ways. If you're taking the online route you have social networks to work with. If I were starting to build a strictly reader fan base today I'd probably keep a blog/page on writing, with perhaps some off posts on creative processes and related stuff, and I'd occasionally throw excerpts or very short stories there. It works for everyone? Nope, you need to be a blogger-type person. It won't work if you don't love it, people will see through it as an attempt to simply sell stuff. But that's just food for thought, one of the many uses of social networking.
  2. I also forgot about this thread (I kinda dropped from the edge of the world actually), sorry for the late reply. Your Paulo Coelho mention brought a smile to my lips, since he's from my country. Is it possible to start in your own language and become an international success later? Surely! The issue is how unlikely it can be. Paulo Coelho was already big here, years upon years of writing. Then he got translated, and it worked, and the fact he got published in US fed into his national fame which fed into his international fame as well, if it's even possible. This man has a seat at the Brazilian Academy of Letters, the biggest honour bestowed upon a Brazilian writer. Yet he went bigger! He took risks! His career is exceptional. It shows you can get translated later and make it work. But it's exceptional. You won't find anyone else from my country experiencing nearly the same success. Even the moderately successful in the national market don't take off the way he did, they just remain moderately successful. To achieve something similar you'll need time, the right marketing strategies, a great book, and a dash of luck. In Coelho's case, going international had a great impact on his career.
  3. Haha. Ideed, I felt it was better to watch it in one go. That's when I decided to wait it to finish airing. It only took me eight years to actually do that. Hm, trying to remember something good to add to this topic, and I can only remember the popular shows I watched recently and didn't like. Since I don't want to be lynched... Walking back in time, I quite enjoyed Attack on Titan. I had some problems with how the characters were presented—Eren is plot blackhole!—, and the contrived pessimism at some points, but the worldbuilding was so delicious I couldn't help to watch (then read) it. Oh, in the same worldbuilding vein, I loved Last Exile. Daaaw!
  4. Landis, there's only a problem here: there might be no italian audiobook. The market varies from country to country. I.e.: Physical books are still pretty strong in my country, and you can see some ebooks now, but audiobooks are a rarity. There is no audiobook for Mistborn, actually, Mistborn is still being translated! They didn't release Hero of Ages yet, hah. I also suspect there might be restrictions to posting pieces of the audio—it's different than quoting text, it'd be an actual file. Not sure about the staff's views on this. Hence the suggestion to use the listen function in Google's Translate, so you get to listen the transcriptions Yata kindly provided. I can't speak for the quality of the Italian audio there, seems a bit slow. You might want use another text-to-audio, e.g.: http://imtranslator.net/translate-and-speak/speak/italian/ (I'm using Portuguese as my basis, it's okay and with the right cadence; italian might be. I'm no italian, after all.) Oh, and since you're building a dialect, this link might be of some interest. It's the annotation by Brandon for this chapter, with the meaning of the quoted conversation (except last line, I didn't transcribe it). I'm impressed by the Italian translation, it seems they referred back to these annotations to ensure the underlying meaning of the exchange wasn't lost in the translation.
  5. Yeah, I think I stopped watching it when this spoiler reveals its relevance. I just rewatched the first episode over lunch and realized I should have given a small content warning here: things can get bloody. They don't use it for shock value, it's linked to the plot, but still...
  6. And it's short! Perfect for watching without compromise. On a fun note, I had no clue it was directed by Watanabe until I started watching. I found the tone so familiar... It was a nice surprise. Hahaha, I had similar reaction! Considering how I couldn't find something grave against it my ultimate decision is "yes, I quite enjoyed it". Yes, it is satisfying to watch. Let me try to put my thoughts in order... - It's beautiful, for a start. - I think the characterization helped here. You won't find many flashy angst yelling teenagers in Zankyou, even the childish characters are collected and thoughtful. Someone like Lisa would be romanticized in another series, she'd be presented like Asuna from SAO. Nine and Twelve always have an edge of danger, if I had to compare them to a known character... I don't know, they remind me of Kelsier from Mistborn, split in two and taken in a different direction. It was refreshing, I'm sick of anime MCs archetypes. I watched Zankyou mostly to see why the characters were doing what they were, and to see how they would act in the situations they were pushed into. - I also appreciated the pacing. While it might annoy people used to shonens, it's the sort of pacing I'm looking for in a series. No "enemy of the week" which will fight the MCs to kill-them-yet-not-because-reasons to artificially raise the stakes. _______ Hm. I'm thinking about finishing Baccano!. I started to watch when it was first aired, but never got around finishing it. It was fun. Mafia, outlaws, alchemy and supernatural elements in the 1930s (and also 1700s). It's hard to follow at the beginning though, too many characters to keep track. Oh, it also has one of the most satisfying OPs I've ever seen. Can't put my finger on what made it so attractive, I suspect it was the successful pairing of the music with the animation, it set the tone just right. Squeezing 17 characters in that opening was a feat. (yes, 17. With names included.): +Random anime suggestion: Seirei no Moribito. It's a bit old now, from 2007, based on a fantasy novel. The protagonist is a spearwoman on her 30s, tasked with protecting the crown prince. It has a fairy-tale like tone, and slower pacing than a shonen. It was responsible for my love of spears as weapon of choice, and I actually wish it had more fights, because they're so mesmerizing.
  7. I'm confused about the audiobook part. Do you wish to hear the audiobook passage or something? The thing is, as far as I know, an audiobook is directly based on the book. The dialogue won't change, if you get your hands on the book translation, you should have the equivalent to the audiobook. Other than English I have only the book version, and it's in Portuguese. It has shared roots with Italian, thus might be of some help. If you feed the text to Google Translate you can listen to a more or less okay pronunciation—though the speaker is tremendously sluggish. Examples from The Final Empire: Chapter 24 English: "Niceing the not on the playing without." (Spook) Portuguese: "Favor não brincar sem." (Spook) En: "Losing the stress on the nip. Notting without the needing of care." (Kelsier) Pt: "Perdendo força do aperto. Sem necessidade de cuidado." (Kelsier) En: "Riding the rile of the rids to the right." (Spook) Pt: "Enredar o enredo dos desembaraços do direito." (Spook) En: "Wasing the was of brightness. Nip the having of wishing of this." (Spook) Pt: "Sendo o ser da brilhanteza. Cortar o ter de querer isso." (Spook) En: "Ever wasing the wish of having the have." (Kelsier) Pt: "Sempre tendo que fazer isso." (Kelsier) They dropped the accent in the translation. I have no clue of where "wasing" comes from, no odd word equivalent was used in the translation. Some sentences read as unintelligibly as in English, others, due the different language structure, make perfect sense (e.g.; "Sem necessidade de cuidado.") and could be used in a formal context, sounding slightly terse at worst. It happens because our verbs inflections are a little more complex than English's. Our verbs make the pronouns implicit, allowing you to drop many of them* in Portuguese. I'm almost sure the same thing happens in Italian. *usually done at the beginning of the sentence, mostly for "I" and "you". We don't need to say "I like you", or "Did you see that?", we can say "Eu gosto de você" and "Você viu isso?".
  8. Yeah, however, she says it in the prologue. It was the first (well, second) time Wax met her, when Wayne was still called a "boy", a time before she got her mysterious gift. Wayne could have picked it from her. Also, the utter lack of reaction from other characters to this expression makes me believe it's not that uncommon. Don't get me wrong, I'd love a Wayne worldhopper. I think he's my favourite Cosmere character.
  9. Same. I'm afraid my tastes changed, I became more exigent and annoying or something. __ To be honest, I haven't watched many animes lately, besides Mushi-shi the only other one I kinda liked was Zankyou no Terror, though this one is from 2014. The characterization made up for a couple of plot holes, and the beautiful style was a plus.
  10. Lessie says "God Beyond" in the SoS prologue.
  11. Witchcraft! It's not only you. I can see it as well, and this page wasn't like this in the past. The page actually has the same margins, but it's absurdly stretched, having ~10k px of width. I peeked at the source code and it's caused by P_2(R )'s code at #4. The culprit is an empty paragraph at the end of his post, right under the names list. It's full of , blank spaces. I'm pretty sure it's the WYSIWYG editor acting dumb again, probably when the author edited his post last time. My sincere advice would be the staff getting rid of this editor and implementing a better one, since it's the second time I see a bug like this being caused by its failure to validate the "pretty" code. It worries me, stinks of vulnerability. Unfortunately, it's probably not feasible. If they add a simple overflow: hidden; to the .entry-content they could avoid this same problem in the future, though sicking random {overflow: hidden}s in the code can generate other issues, to not speak of the possibility of someone figuring out how maliciously exploit of the wacky validation.
  12. They're clearly talking about duck sandwich. Inbreading is merely another way to refer to a dish composed by closely related slices of bread, as in from the same loaf. No?
  13. Sera

    Wayne's Goldminds

    He went out of his way to establish that Wayne ended the book unable to heal himself. It's a mystery whether it's a continuity error—Sanderson forgot to establish Wayne hadn't enough health stored to fully heal such injury—or despite wanting to end the book with Wayne wounded he thought it wasn't necessary to wrap up the metalminds' fate in the epilogue. The third alternative is that the missing metalminds are actually a tiny hook for the next book. Either something mildly relevant for some plot point, or a red herring.
  14. Sera

    Wayne's Goldminds

    Yeah, he was out of bendalloy. A quick search, though, suggests he wasn't out of health yet. Not sure if it's the last we read about his metalminds, but he said to MeLaan in the shack scene (where she talks about human flesh taste, and they're accompanied by Marasi): "Maybe I'm different. Wanna gnaw on my arm a bit? It'll grow right back, least once we find out what that monster did with my metalminds..." It's implied he had health. So, now I'm curious too. I can't see feruchemical gold being terribly useful for a kandra. I wonder if she simply discarded it when fleeing, if she gave it to someone, or if she burned it at some moment (though it's a very narrow window of time there).
  15. Sera

    Wayne's Goldminds

    I'm almost sure he had no health stored at this point—I remember it was foreshadowed a couple of times. Bleeder might have not known he exhausted his reserves. She was careful, but not omniscient.
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