Happy 2026!

It is our 30th anniversary here at Space Dock 13!

On the web since 1996!

ChatGPT's Answer:

Certainly! Let's explore an alternative perspective:

1. Detailed Descriptions:
- Instead of selective details, consider providing more detailed descriptions of the journey. This can immerse the reader in the world you've created and give them a vivid sense of the travel experience. Use descriptive language to paint a rich picture of the landscapes, cultures, and challenges your characters encounter.

2. Exploration of World-Building:
- View the long stretches of travel as an opportunity to further explore and develop your story's world. Introduce new cultures, customs, and landscapes in greater detail. This not only adds depth to your narrative but also allows readers to fully engage with the fictional universe you've crafted.

3. Character Solitude:
- Consider emphasizing moments of solitude during the journey. Use these moments for introspection and character development. The travel time can serve as a reflective period for characters to confront their fears, make important decisions, or undergo personal growth.

4. Real-time Challenges:
- Instead of summarizing less eventful periods, focus on real-time challenges and obstacles. Highlight the difficulties your characters face during the journey, whether it's navigating treacherous terrain, surviving harsh weather, or overcoming interpersonal conflicts. This approach can maintain a sense of tension throughout the travel sequences.

5. Extended Subplots:
- Expand on subplots that unfold during the journey. Rather than summarizing, delve deeper into these side stories to create a more intricate narrative. These subplots can add complexity to the overall plot and offer readers additional layers to engage with during the travel segments.

6. Temporal Flow:
- Avoid time jumps and maintain a continuous flow of time during the travel. This can create a sense of realism and allow readers to experience the passage of time alongside the characters. By providing a more linear timeline, you immerse the audience in the journey's duration.

7. Slow-Paced Narrative:
- Embrace a slower-paced narrative during the travel sequences. This allows for a more leisurely exploration of the story and its elements. Readers may appreciate the opportunity to savor the details of the journey and fully absorb the atmosphere you've created.

Ultimately, the key is to align your approach with the overall tone and style of your story. While condensing travel sequences can maintain a brisk pace, expanding on the details and challenges can create a more immersive and textured storytelling experience.

Quaraun aka The Pink Necromancer, and his Frost Lich husband, BoomFuzzy the Unicorn

This advice is good if you are writing a plot driven story, but fails hard if you pit it against a character driven story.

Character development is a thing which did not exist barely thirty years ago. It's utterly ridiculous that everyone puts it as the end all be all in writing a story these days.

Character development is just another word for character arch.

Character arcs are bad writing.

Character development is bad writing.

Telling someone to only write travel scenes if it promotes character development is bad advice.

And the sorry thing about ChatGPT giving this advice, is that it is just regurgitating this commonly given bad advice.

Telling someone to only write a scene if it promotes character development is shitty ass bad advice given by people who clearly never read a book, let alone ever published one.

What it boils down to is people who do not write, giving bad writing advice, that they don’t know is bad, because they are too stupid to read books that used the advice they are regurgitating. In other words, it is advice that is given out by scam artists who run affiliate sites and they don't give a rat's ass if the advice is good or not because all they care about is getting clicks on their affiliate links so they don't even bother to fact check their advice, because giving factual advice that actually helps people is not their goal.

These idiot scammers scrap bad advice off each other to respin and before you know it now thousands of clueless non writers, are giving out the same bad advice so many times that new young writers who have never read any actual REAL BOOKS think the websites that are lying for clicks MUST be Telling the truth and then they try to write books using the shitty bad advice and then wonder why no one will publish them and beta readers are telling them its bad writing!

And then they ask why is it bad writing!

Why is it bad writing?

Good god, have you ever read a book outside of MG or YA? You are that character arcs exist EXCLUSIVELY in books written for CHILDREN, right? Character arcs are not a thing that exists in books written for adults. Why? Because books written for children are written to teach a lesson in moral behavior while books written for adults are written to entertain adults.

Pro tip: read. Actual books. Not kiddie lit written for children. Not MG books. Not YA books. Not light novels. Not web novels. Not ebooks. Read actual traditionally published paperback books written by actual adults, for adult readers. Read actual real books that you buy in actual real stores. If you've no bookstore in your town, go to Walmart, they sell 64% of all books sold on the planet, yes, Walmart sells more books per month than Amazon sells per year. Buy some real books and read them. It'll do wonders at teaching you how plots occur in books. And you'll find yourself amazed to see that unlike MG and YA books, real books are entertaining instead of educational.

Remember, character arcs are **AN EDUCATIONAL TOOL USED BY SCHOOLS TO TEACH CHILDREN MORALS** and that's why character arcs exist is MG and YA books, but do not exist in actual real, traditionally published paperback novels.

And it is children who never read a novel before, who write web novels, and children write what they know, so web novels only ever contain silly childish things like teenage characters going through moral growth educational character arcs.

When children grow up and start reading real books, they quickly realize how incredibly childish character arcs are and move away from writing them in favor of actually writing something that is actually entertaining.

You can read ten million books for adults without ever once crossing paths with a single, solitary hint of character arc.

Character arcs are the epitome of bad writing. Nothing screams amateur writer who never read a book in their lives, like a character arc. Nothing says this author is a child under 18 years old like the inclusion of a character arc.

Adult books don't have character arcs because adults are grown up and are no longer in school learning how to behave like adults.

Children's books (MG and YA) are riddled with character arcs because children are not grown up and are still in school, still learning how to behave like adults and so need character arcs to teach them to not act immature idiots, because let's face it, all children act immature idiots, no matter how "more mature" they are then other children.

Character arcs are a teaching tool that have no business being placed in books meant for entertainment. The purpose of a character arc is to teach the reader a lesson in social skills, so that they can learn how to behave in public. Character arcs show a morally grey person do bad things, learn a lesson, and progress into a better person, to show the reader: "Look. See? This is how you should act. This is why you don't do bad things."

Let's take BatMan character the Joker for example. The Joker exists in books written for adults. Yes, children read those books, but consider WHY children prefer to read BatMan, a series aimed at mature readers aged 30 to 60s years old. BatMan is fun to read, because BatMan is written to entertain readers. BatMan is NOT written to teach readers a lesson in morality. And because of this, BatMan characters have no character arcs. The Joker is a prime example of this.

We readers know that the Joker is never going to change. The Joker will never learn his lesson and become a better person. The Joker will never become good or moral. The Joker will continue to kill and maim and steal and destroy everything and every one in his path. We expect the Joker to always be The Joker. And because the Joker exists without a character arc, he always returns in every story, behaving exactly as we readers expect him to behave. We don't read the Joker's exploits hoping to see him become reformed. We don't root for the Joker to become a better person. Give the Joker a character arc, and you will completely destroy the villain we all know and love.

And, here's the kicker… before Harry Potter was published in 1996, you will be hard pressed to find character arcs in ANY book at all, even children's books. Character arcs are a fairly new invention that did not exist in books just thirty years ago.

Look at characters like Nancy Drew. Nancy Drew is arguably one of the top selling strong female young adult characters of all time. Created in 1937 and still selling strong today, 90 years later, spanning more than 800 volumes written by more than 300 (mostly male) authors, all using the same female penname, Nancy Drew is loved by fans precisely because readers know what to expect.

Nancy Drew has no character arc. And if you've ever read the books, you know she is NOT the goody two shoes, none readers often incorrectly assume her to be. She is the strawberry blonde girl detective who helps her big name lawyer dad solve his cases. While her dad is off trying to put criminals in prison, Nancy Drew, at just 14 years old (in the originals; her age has been changed to 18 or 24 in reprint editions) uses her skills as a busy body to sneak her way into people's houses, local crime scenes, tamper with evidence, steal cars to get across town, and overall save the day by finding that one clue that daddy lawyer needs to seal his court case.

Underage Nancy, who doesn't have a driver's license, never gets caught stealing daddy's red sports car and driving across town so never learns not to commit small crimes to solve big crimes.

Nancy never gets caught breaking and entering so, she never learns this is wrong and she shouldn't do it.

Even though the police are always all around her, Nancy never gets caught tampering with evidence at crime scenes, never gets caught stealing evidence, never gets caught planting evidence, and because her father is the wealthiest lawyer in the country, the police pat the little girl on the head and laugh, when she scampers about the crime scene trampling evidence… because her father can and would buy the police station and fire them if they told the snot nosed little brat Nancy to stop messing up the crime scene.

Nancy never learns to behave, and uses her mean girl, wealthy snobbery, to get her way, and win the day every time.

Nancy Drew is the furthest thing from a good role model for girls, and is the epitome of rich spoilt brat using unscrupulous flanting of mega wealth to get her way and evade the law, using ruthless and usually illegal methods to solve cases for her mega billionaire lawyer dad, which is why in recent years many of the original Nancy Drew books have either been heavily censored in the reprinted editions or have just been outright banned by schools completely.

But the fact remains Nancy Drew always solves the case, the bad guy always goes to jail, she always saves her lawyer father's law firm, and she always steals cars, breaks into houses, trespasses, and tampers with police evidence to do it, every single time, without so much as a scolding for any of her outright illegal methods used to solve her cases.

Nancy Drew has no character arc. She never learns not to do illegal things to solve her cases. She never learns stealing cars is wrong. She never learns breaking and entering is wrong. She never learns trespassing is wrong.she never learns destroying police evidence, planting evidence, or tampering with a crime scene is wrong. Why? Because if Nancy Drew had a character arc, she would learn a lesson, she would stop commit crimes to solve cases, and the series would fall apart and cease to exist. The series is able to go on for 800+ volumes, precisely BECAUSE Nancy never learns her lesson and so she repeats these illegal activities every single time in more than eight hundred volumes.

Just as giving the Joker a character arc, and would completely destroy the villain we all know and love, so too would giving Nancy Drew a character arc completely destroy the ability of the girl detective to solve her lawyer daddy's cases.

**Nothing kills a series faster than a character arc.**

And keep in mind here, the ONLY way to succeed in fast release method of self publishing on Amazon is to write a **none continuing stand alone series**. Which means, authors on Amazon who are publishing 4+ books a year, **ARE NOT** writing character arcs.

If you start to pay attention to those of us doing the fast release method, you will notice a trend: we are writing non-continuous stand alone series.

This means that like BatMan or Nancy Drew every story is fully self-contained, unnumbered, and can be read in any order without ever reading any other story in the set.

Like the Simpsons TV show, BatMan comics, or Nancy Drew books, the characters exist in stasis. Never aging. Never growing older. Nancy Drew books mention years, dates, real world news reports, and yet Nancy Drew is always a teenager whether the story is talking about the Great Depression going, the moon landing happening, or going to a Motley Crew concert… all things Nancy Drew has been a part of. Nancy Drew was 14 years old in 1937. Nancy Drew was still 14 years old in 1968. Nancy Drew was still 14 years old in 1984. Nancy Drew is still 14 years old, now in the new releases that are set in 2023.

BatMan and Nancy Drew were both released the same year: 1937 and both have never aged. Never grown older. Never changed their ways. Never learned to be better people. And readers are fine with that. Readers enjoy being able to return to the series and find the characters exactly as expected. Readers don't want the characters to grow or age or learn moral lessons or change. And so character arcs do not exist.

If you're story cannot exist without a character arc, than you may want to consider that your story may very well be badly written, because as every avid reader will quickly tell you, there is nothing more dull, more boring, more ho hum, or more indicative of an amateur author who never read book in their life then including a character arc in their story.

If more writers would spend more time on reader subs, hanging out with readers, and paying attention to reader complaints, they would notice very quickly how much readers hate, hate, hate, hate, HATE character arcs. Readers want good entertaining stories, not religious freak pounding moral lessons in their faces… and that is exactly how readers describe it. Readers post on Reddit reading subs daily, by the thousands of comments, on how much they hate writers preaching moral lessons instead of telling stories.

Nothing is more hated by readers than character arcs, because character arcs exist only to teach moral life lessons via showing character moral growth. And guess what: riddling your story of overshadowing moral life lessons, kills the reader's desire to ever buy another one of your books ever again, because readers want to be entertained. Readers do not want to be preached to, and it is completely impossible for a character arc to exist without the author preaching a lesson on moral character growth.

And, this is WHY the biggest sellers on Amazon are the biggest sellers on Amazon…because they DO NOT drown their books in life lessons and moral preaching taught through character arcs.

Look at the biggest names in Amazon KDP self publishing. Their books are fun to read, that's why people read them. Their books are entertaining. Their books follow the Nancy Drew format of creating a character and NOT changing that character, the character NOT growing morally, changing personality, or learning life lessons. Good characters stay good. Bad characters stay bad. Moral grey characters remain morally grey. No one changes. No one progresses. No one grows. No one ages. The characters remain in stasis. And readers love it.

Readers love characters whom they can return to again and again. Readers love consistency. Readers love that they can read volume 1 or volume 100 and the character they know and love is still the character they know and love, unchanged.

If you want to succeed in the fast release method on Amazon KDP, I highly recommend you read at least fifty Nancy Drew books first, and study the complete and total lack of character arc. Study the fact that each story stands on its own, complete with a beginning, middle, and end. Study how there are no cliffhangers. Study how no volume ends on a "to be continued". Study how every story follows a formula. Study how similar each volume is, that you can almost play mad libs with character and place names, to solve every single Nancy Drew mystery within the first 10 pages of the book.

The Nancy Drew books are the best teachers for learning how to write a successful series that readers will return to again and again, buying every volume in rabid addiction.

And this is the same formula used by every top selling self published Amazon KDP fast release writer, regardless of genre, be it Romance or Thriller or Erotica or Mystery or Fantasy or SciFi.

* Create a character, whom you can write hundreds of stories about.

* Create a world you can set hundreds of stories in.

* Create or find a formula (beat sheet) that works for your genre, and use it for every story. (I use Lester Dent's for mine: https://mysteriouspress.com/blog/the-lester-dent-pulp-fiction-formula.asp It's designed for people who write 5k to 15k word short stories. I write 20k to 35k shorts, publishing one about every 10 days and so this formula works well for me.)

* Then just drop that character into that world, slap the beat sheet formulae on him, and start writing. Writing a complete story, beginning, middle, and end, without any character arc, without the story being connected to any other story you ever wrote. Edit. Publish. Repeat.

Keep using the same one character in every story. Keep never connecting the new story to any of the old stories. Keep refusing to allow the character to change or grow, keep him consistently the same every time so readers know what to expect from him.

This really is the secret to success, when it comes to the fast release method of self publishing on Amazon.

Readers love a character whom they can return to over and over again. Readers love a character who DOES NOT change. Readers love the comfort of knowing this character is who he is, come hell or high water.

Character arcs kill success. Stop using them if you want to succeed in the fast release method self publishing.

It is incredibly annoying when people who have no clue how to write spit out bad writing advice that leads impressionable new young writers astray.

And yes, I know this is side tracking way off the topic of writing travel scenes, but it just passes me off that this shitty bad advice is so prevalent on the internet that ChatGPT thinks it's good advice to give!

If the end is all you care about, why read the book at all?

Just read the end and be done with it.

I really can't stand readers who rush through a book as fast as possible just to find out the ending, then bitch that the ending made no sense, because they were too busy mad dash rush skipping scenes to pay attention to the STORY.

A story should be about the STORY.

The ending is just window dressing.

Yes, of course you want a good ending, sure. But what is the point of a good ending if there is no story in the middle leading up to that good ending?

If the story is so unimportant that you can skip it and jump to the end, then what was the point of writing the story at all?

Travel scenes should be part of the story.

Quaraun aka The Pink Necromancer, and his Frost Lich husband, BoomFuzzy the Unicorn

Quaraun aka The Pink Necromancer, and his Frost Lich husband, BoomFuzzy the Unicorn

Quaraun aka SunTa The Grand High Emperor of The Triple Planets, with his great-grandson Etoile

This is my preferred method.

Interestingly, I have found that it is often the least liked by readers.

My book with the most reader complaints, The Vampire Leprechaun of Fire Mountain, the complaints were unanimously about the trip. Unfortunately for them, the trip was the ENTIRE story.

It was a slow moving tale, which started when main character Quaraun, decided to head to Fire Mountain, packed up his campsite and set out, with his friends following along.

The first night they meet an old man who set up camp alongside the road. They joined his camp and ate his food. In the morning he was gone and they oddly got the feeling they were in yesterday's campsite. They pack up and head back on the road to Fire Mountain.

On the second night they meet the old man again who set up camp alongside the road. They joined his camp and ate his food. Only minor details are different from the day before. They comment on how the day seems to be the same as yesterday. In the morning he was gone and they oddly got the feeling they were in yesterday's campsite. They pack up and head back on the road to Fire Mountain.

On the third night they meet the old man again who set up camp alongside the road. They joined his camp and ate his food. Only minor details are different from the day before. They comment on how the day seems to be the same as yesterday. In the morning he was gone and they oddly got the feeling they were in yesterday's campsite. They pack up and head back on the road to Fire Mountain.

On the fourth night they meet the old man again who set up camp alongside the road. They joined his camp and ate his food. Only minor details are different from the day before. They no longer notice the day seems to be the same as yesterday, in fact they do not recognize the old man and think this is the first time seeing him. In the morning he was gone and they no longer have the feeling they were in yesterday's campsite, but the reader knows they are. They pack up and head back on the road to Fire Mountain.

On the fifth night they meet the old man again who set up camp alongside the road. They joined his camp and ate his food. Only minor details are different from the day before, they do not notice, but the reader does. They no longer notice the day seems to be the same as yesterday, in fact they do not recognize the old man and think this is the first time seeing him. In the morning he was gone and they no longer have the feeling they were in yesterday's campsite, but the reader knows they are. They pack up and head back on the road to Fire Mountain.

On the fifth night BoomFuzzy is sick and eats no food. They meet the old man again who set up camp alongside the road. They joined his camp and ate his food, except for BoomFuzzy. Only minor details are different from the day before, they do not notice, but the reader does. They no longer notice the day seems to be the same as yesterday, in fact they do not recognize the old man and think this is the first time seeing him. BoomFuzzy starts to see things the other characters do not see. In the morning the old man is gone and they no longer have the feeling they were in yesterday's campsite, but the reader knows they are, and BoomFuzzy sees gold coins on the ground. They pack up and head back on the road to Fire Mountain.

On the sixth night they meet the old man again who set up camp alongside the road. They joined his camp and ate his food, except for BoomFuzzy. Only minor details are different from the day before, they do not notice, but the reader does and so does BoomFuzzy, who is no longer drugged by the leprechaun's food, can see the campsite for what it really is: they have reached Fire Mountain and are sitting at the gate. They no longer notice the day seems to be the same as yesterday, in fact they do not recognize the old man and think this is the first time seeing him. BoomFuzzy sees things the other characters do not see and he tries to tell them. In the morning the old man is gone and they no longer have the feeling they were in yesterday's campsite, but the reader knows they are, and BoomFuzzy sees gold coins on the ground. They pack up and head back on the road to Fire Mountain.

On the seventh night BoomFuzzy makes sure no one eats the food and Quaraun realizes they are caught in the trap of a Leprechaun. The Leprechaun is revealed to be FarDarrig and undead Vampire Leprechaun who guards Fire Mountain.

The book ends with them defeating the Vampire Leprechaun and the fog lifts revealing they have arrived at Fire Mountain.

And the book received over a hundred one star reviews each stating they were angry that the book ended upon arriving at Fire Mountain and never showed them climb the mountain to see what was there.

The story was about the encounter with the leprechaun and how they had been tricked into an endless journey. But readers apparently used to skipping travel scenes, kept skipping each camping scene, finally got to the end, and then because they had skipped the travel scenes, which was the entire book, they got a disappointment upon discovery that the point of the story WAS the trip itself and NOT the destination after the trip.

>7. Slow-Paced Narrative: - Embrace a slower-paced narrative during the travel sequences. This allows for a more leisurely exploration of the story and its elements. Readers may appreciate the opportunity to savor the details of the journey and fully absorb the atmosphere you've created.

And the whole thing was written as a slow paced narrative, embracing the travel scenes, the characters leisurely pointing out landscapes, birds, flowers, acorns, whatever, as they walked, savoring the details, absorbed in the atmosphere.

Had readers not been in a rush to skip the travel scenes, skip the trip, and get to whatever action they told themselves was going to happen on top the mountain, they would have realized the trip itself WAS the point of the story.

That too was clear in the negative reviews that The Vampire Leprechaun of Fire Mountain got flooded with. Every review botched and moaned about the lack of action and repeated the sentence again and again: “There is no action, I kept waiting for something to happen, but nothing ever happened.”

A lot happened on the road, and had not skipped the road trip, they would have known that.