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What horror stories have you heard? (Then we can think how to avoid them!)

Also while keeping an open mind to the feedback you receive, don’t forget you’re in charge and you can ‘Accept, adapt, reject’. You don’t have to take on board all advice you’re given and the best way to decide what is and isn’t useful is to read feedback and then give yourself time to think about it, coming back to it after a little break with a…[Read more]

It’s worth reminding ourselves here of Neil Gaiman’s famous quote:

‘When someone tells you something isn’t working, they are nearly always right. When they tell you how to fix it, they are nearly always wrong.’

Yes, there wasn’t much fantasy being written then, certainly not on the industrial scale we have today.

Obscure though Cabell is to the reading public, he has been quite influential in his genre. He nfluenced later writers of humorous fantasy like Jack Vance and Fritz Leiber, whose stories also feature protagonists who fall some way short of…[Read more]

Tried to insert an image but can’t do it properly. I see the three sticky topics, followed by your Test topic.

Ooh Squidge, I’m not sure I’m brave enough for that. After hearing horror stories i’m a little gun-shy. But now i’ll have more time to research them, I know i’ll stumble upon some darlings.

Thanks to all for your comments thus far. Very helpful stuff.

Ah! Now I understand. Welcome Elle/L, good to see you

Fascinating stuff Richard. Not an author I recall coming across, though the title quotation is familar. It soulds as though he had throughly subverted many of the common tropes of fantasy before that genre really got going.

Hi Barny, I was L. on the Word Cloud but the minimum is four letter here.

Yes. It’s one of the little snarls to be untangled – that sticky topics show in a sub forum even though they are located in a separate forum.

I see the lifeboat FAQ and the house rules thread as well as this topic and the creitique FAQ

Yes. Excellent point, Squidge. When monkeying around with someone else’s work, it’s important to always remember that your ideas and the author’s ideas may not mesh. Any rewriting should be done sparingly, strictly as an example (unless the author requests otherwise) and the power should always be returned to the author when you’ve finished.

My agent experience is sh!te, so I can’t help much except to say that, so long as you don’t utterly muck up the cover letter, it shouldn’t matter hugely. I honestly believe that any agent who likes your work will like it regardless of the cover letter, and any agent who dislikes you because of your cover letter regardless of the quality of the…[Read more]