Draugameistari Chronicles - Author's notes

 Once you see it you can't unsee it.  Everyone is afraid of Pangram these days and wondering whether their prose seems like it was written by AI. You all have heard the usual tells. Em dashes. Not X, but Y. Delve. Tapestries. Intricate. Whatnot. Those aren’t the tells of AI-written text these days. How do I know? I tried it. I use AI in my free time and at work (I am an occupational health doctor doing workplace hazard audits) for different tasks, but more on that later. It does not write my prose for me, though, because it is BAD. As Horowitz put it, we humans are better, and I am better, even though my grammar sometimes disagrees. Except now I let it write for me. Here is an example of how AI writes. I may have edited it a bit. Can you guess what parts are mine? The Silence Between Us The storm raged outside, rain lashing against the windows, the desperate fingers of a thousand forgotten ghosts scraping the glass. The house groaned under the pressure of the moment, its ancie...

 Most people might have heard about those. Or at least seen the  Ægishjálmur  or Vegvísir symbols circulating around. On shirts, on jewelry, tattooed on people... They are galdrastaves. Galdrastafir. Magic symbols, but not Viking symbols. No. Those are the Icelandic version of sigil magic that was a hot thing back in the Renaissance era. We of course do not know when the tradition actually started, but most symbols we know were recorded circa 1600-1800. Viking may or may not have used them, and thus calling them Viking symbols is inaccurate. My interest in galdrastaves started around 2001 when I read Margit Sandemo's Witchmaster-series. Sandemo was an enormous influence in my writing and worldview, pointing me towards folklore and history, but now I digress, and more of that maybe later. I searched with the limited internet access and limited English skills a 13-year-old Finnish teenager had, but somehow that special interest has stayed with me all these years. I visited ...

I have been trying to figure out how to best build an "author brand" or whatever. Meaning how to get people to know you exist and what you are doing so that maybe they'd like to read the book. You know, the basics.   I am not a social media gal. I have my private Instagram, which I occasionally overuse to ramble about whatever random things have caught my hyperfixation at the moment, but mostly I am quite passive.  I follow cool people and comment on their reels every now and then, but I have zero desire to be a famous influencer.  Or even famous.  I was living under the illusion that if you get a traditional publisher deal (which I don't have, since I haven't even queried agents yet, but it's better to plan things out well in advance, aye?), they handle the marketing.   Well, they don't.   Publishers demand that authors do the marketing themselves too and sometimes to pay for their own part  out of their own pockets. It helps if you sta...