“Don’t use flashy dialogue tags,” she advised sagely.

What’s a flashy dialogue tag? Something exactly like “she advised sagely.”

The post title is an example of a fumblerule; a piece of advice that goes against itself.

In writing fiction, it is best to avoid flashy dialogue tags like “she growled angrily” and “he moped sullenly.”

Why? And what should we write instead?

*Image credit: Ebenezer Landells – https://www.abbottandholder-thelist.co.uk/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81100198

Continue reading “Don’t use flashy dialogue tags,” she advised sagely.

Notes on writing and fantasy fiction

Below is an attempt to consolidate what I know and would like to share from my experience in and around publishing and my knowledge as a reader.

Here’s an outline of the post:

Writing advice
Literary fiction vs. commercial fiction
Save the Cat by Blake Snyder
SPJG posts about writing advice books
SPJG posts about avoiding writing mistakes
Miscellaneous links

Recommended authors: children’s and YA fantasy
“Recent” (1980s onward)
“Classic” (1900 to 1980)

Publishing
Purpose
Audience
Context
Process via self-publishing
Process via traditional publishing

Writing communities
Singapore Writer’s Group
NaNoWriMo
Reddit

Conclusion

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Ten-year anniversary of SPJG blog: Woohoo!

There are blog posts that appear to be older than 10 years, but the blog was launched 10 years ago. It now has over 900 published posts totaling 537,731 words.

When I wrote the post title, “woohoo” made me think of my brother for some reason, and so then maybe “more than 900 posts” made me think of the “over 9000” Dragonball meme ‘cuz my brother is a big Dragonball fan.

Celebrating 5 years of We Love Translations!

It was exactly five years ago that I launched the website We Love Translations.

I’ve learned a lot in that time about the work of translation, patterns in translation histories, the market for classic literature, the relative popularity of different works, and about running a website.

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Books I read in 2025

Lorna Doone by R.D. Blackmore

The best novel I read this year was probably Lorna Doone, by R.D. Blackmore, though I also really enjoyed Ivanhoe, by Walter Scott. I hadn’t read either of them before.

I achieved a major goal for the year: reading an English translation of the hugely long classic Chinese novel, Water Margin, also known as Outlaws of the Marsh.

See below for a complete list, book cover thumbnails, and thoughts on the quantity, length, format, and content of the books I read in 2025.

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Places visited in 2025

Siqi and I didn’t travel as much this year as last year (that would be pretty hard to do, actually), but we did get to travel together both within China (Wuyi, Ningbo, and Shenzhen) and internationally (Madrid). Separately, I went to Harbin and Beijing for work and also went to a conference in San Diego and visited with family in San Diego and Atlanta.

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Movies watched in 2025

In 2025, I watched 46 movies and 3 different tv shows.

I watched 9 movies on planes and Siqi and I watched 10 movies in theaters. The rest, we watched on DVD or online. Also, I watched a bunch of stuff by myself when I was sick.

See below for the complete list, with comments and recommendations.

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Perplexity and me

I sometimes use the generative AI tool Perplexity when I’m working on We Love Translations. What do I use it for, you ask?

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Tumblr Account: I Laughed At This Stuff

I have a Tumblr account called I Laughed At This Stuff. I created it as a place to reshare memes, because I didn’t want to post them here on SPJG or on my Facebook account, which have other purposes.

I posted some stuff there, but I now have a huge file of images saved from the internet (okay, mostly Facebook and Boredpanda, but Facebook and Boredpanda got at least half of them from Reddit and Tumblr) that I have always been intending to add, but never did. The farther behind I got in uploading, the less likely I was to start uploading again…

The Tumblr posts I want to create would consist of:

  • The image
  • The text in the image (or some sort of manual description or comment)
  • The date the image was saved to my computer
  • One or more category tags

Given that, since sometime in 2018, I have accumulated over 12,000 images that I might want to post (I don’t actually want to post all of them, just the best ones), manual posting is increasingly impracticable.

That’s where Perplexity comes in. It’s an AI tool that I decided to subscribe to, even though I hate subscriptions. It turns out, it’s good at helping me use software to speed up manual tasks.

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What’s the best translation of Around the World in Eighty Days?

The AI tool Perplexity helps me in a variety of ways, especially with my work on my other website, We Love Translations. But look at happened when I asked it to help me make a collage of 10 of the covers of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days!!!

Continue reading What’s the best translation of Around the World in Eighty Days?