Barny

Thanks Jules.

I have so missed reading your writing! So good to see you here x

Ooh… I like this. Love the ramblings of his mind and the nuggets he reveals. I think I only noticed one it’s instead of its towards the start, so don’t worry so much about the dyslexia…

The first thing I picked up on are his speech/thought patterns. By which I mean he sounds…[Read more]

Like it. You mentioned ‘telly’ bits – as in telling, rather than showing. So when we first meet Florence, you tell us ‘a woman was sitting in a chair’ – a simple change like ‘a woman sat in a chair, eyes on the tv’ can make it less so. Similarly, towards the end, ‘He held a glass in each hand which…’could become something like ‘The glasses in…[Read more]

Thanks @debi! I am indebted to you and Emma for getting me this stage 🙂 I’m so excited…I’m watching emails between my agent and the Penguin Random House editor fly, saying such nice things, and I’m having to pinch myself 🙂

@bric – thank you love! You played a big part with your beta magnificence, too 🙂

And thank you everyone, for all…[Read more]

Read some of those stories, @johnalty – superb stuff, all with a strong, distinct voice. Even a couple of twists. Looking forward to finding @elle‘s stuff too

Absolutely FANTASTIC! I cannot express how delighted I am! Ada is brilliant and her story deserves to be told and filmed and …. oh I am so happy!

Kaz! KAAAAAZZZZ! This is utterly brilliant news. I’m so delighted and excited for you. You’re absolutely right to have an agent too, even though you’ve already got what most people want from an agent. As soon as there’s somewhere online that I can link to, I’ll be adding you to the Self-Edit Hall of Fame. Lots of you are already listed there.…[Read more]

That’s brilliant news. Congratulations!

Thabks for the shout out, Kaz 😊 it was your talent and perseverence that won the day though xxx

You’re all brilliant. Thank you so much for your really heartwarming comments. I keep reading them with (another) stupid grin on my face.

And I have been VERY remiss in not singling out two members of the previous Cloud for special thanks – @debi and Emma Darwin, who run the phenomenally excellent Self Editing your Novel course – which first…[Read more]

Heaven comes to she who waits – and of course works very hard and never gives up! Wonderful times, huge congratulations!

Well done. That’s wonderful. It must be a fab book to have an agent and publisher chasing you and not without a great deal of hard work and effort behind it. Congratulations!

There are two things it does do, John.

1 – it forms one of the filters on what you want to see on the main wall (Activity tab on main menu). You can toggle through the sub menu and choose to only see what friends have said. Right now we’re a small forum of 70 but if we hit a couple of 1000 of active users, you might very well prefer to just see…[Read more]

You mean the coppery tang of blood as her scalpel slices through pale flesh?! Just kidding. I know what you mean, Laure, I need to work on the atmosphere.
I hope this exercise is helping others to get a grasp of what makes a story work – join in everyone.

This reads better and I like that ending much better. One thing I think it’s missing at least for me are smell, colours, touch, little details that makes a scene come alive and differentiate it from other stories. For example, the smells in the nursing home, or when you said the restaurant was shabby, how was it shabby are we talking mismatched…[Read more]