Claire Waller

Excellent News. I loved that story!

Fantastic news. A great story. Very thoughtful and moving.

Complacency and casual disregard for human life ain’t the half of it, sometimes.

I mentioned above that the Railways Inspectorate had a battle in the nineteenth century to get fail-safe brakes adopted. They were up against not only reluctance to spend money – the so-called automatic vacuum brake was more complicated (and therefore more e…[Read more]

Jeez that’s some incident. I did not know about this at all – thanks for telling the story so vividly, Richard!
It just shows that human nature – our inability to foresee and avert disaster until something truly catastrophic has happened – is unchanged over the years/decades/centuries.

It certainly is. Mindboggling that such a catastrophe could have come about through a momentary lapse by a single person. Less mindboggling that the means of preventing such a catastrophe had long existed but not been implemented.

As Ath says, the parallels between this incident, along with many of the others you’ve written about over the y…[Read more]

How astonishing that an event with so much loss of life has faded from memory. I mean, not literally, it’s still there in the records – and you’ve just blogged about it. That said, it’s coming up to 70 years, I suppose. Great blog as ever, Richard. I shake my head when you write about the prevarication and penny-pinching over AWS. Then I remember…[Read more]

Thank you for the beta read offers. I’m not sure I’m ready yet, but I will keep you in mind, and return the offer. Swapsies!

Congratulations, John! Well done to all – and thanks to Libby for the comp and the perceptive comments.

And thank you for your comments too, Mad Iguana.

Debi thank you for this. Yes, I do think you’re right about the agent giving her time and it’s true that my disappointment is down to my expectations and hopes more than anything else. As I say, she was perfectly ‘nice’ and of course her prime motivation is going to be can she sell it. But in the meeting, I felt her doubt about this came across…[Read more]

Jeez that’s shocking behaviour. Both from your agent @Hilary and @janette.
I’ve never got that close – I mean, I’ve had full requests but no more than that – but I’d have thought you could at least rely on agents to be honest.
We’ve all been blanked on a submission – which is par for the course, even if I don’t particularly like it. But to bring…[Read more]

Thank you everyone for your solidarity and kind comments about my writing, and for the encouragement to realise all the positives in this tale as well. And, @janette, for someone not to reply properly having suggested revisions – that is, indeed, unprofessional.

I am taking a step back from that experience and that novel, and working on the…[Read more]

Incidentally, as this year I am coasting towards the age where I am ‘losing my hair’, and wondering whether I will be locked out at quarter to three (never mind getting a bottle of wine for my birthday or a Valentine’s card), I suppose I should resign myself to joining that league of elderly no-hopers that includes Hilary Mantel, Philip Pullman…[Read more]

Oh Hilary and Janette, I feel for you. Somehow it’s much harder when your hopes have been raised. I guess they’ve got further to fall.

@Janette. I understand that agents receive zillions of submissions everyday and can’t respond personally to each one but I do think, when they’ve requested a full or asked for edits to be made, they could at leas…[Read more]

In the news this morning: several actresses walked out of the César awards (the French Oscars) after convicted rapist Roman Polanski won Best Director for his film ‘J’Accuse’ (‘An Officer and a Spy’). Obviously the French film academy considers that a work should be judged on its own merits rather on the morals of who’s responsible for it.…[Read more]

Hilary, my reactions to this are twofold. First, intense sympathy for you. What an awful let-down! Even if she did make clear what the actual purpose of the meeting was, it shows a certain sense of entitlement (as Ath said) to expect you to come running to London at the crook of a finger just for a chat about revisions. And if it never occurred to…[Read more]