Clebs

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]

I’m astounded by all these badly behaved agents, because bad behaviour it is. It’s just rude, and they must understand how galling it is for an author to get their hopes up needlessly – or maybe they don’t. And as for not replying after requesting a full – well, it’s appalling. @janette your experience in particular has me fuming. How can he gush…[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]

I sort of worry a bit when I see agents pushing writers this way. In fact, my hackles start to hack or rise or whatever they’d do if I had them. Book Club fiction is Literary Fiction that agents reckon they should be able to sell better than average. As for this splitting of work into ever more categories as though this is some kind of scientific…[Read more]

Oh blimey Hilary! What a demoralising experience! Did she mention your age ina negative ‘this is offputting’ kind of way? Because that’s outrageous if so. And you’re right – I see so many ‘I got my first book deal at x yrs old’ that I would never have expected it to be an issue. My guess/hope is that this agent is perhaps the exception rather than…[Read more]

Shades of the Prison House

Freddie worries about his snail as he trudges through the iron gates. Will she remember to give it the lettuce leaves? There’d been no time before they left what with packing his bag with pencils and crayons. And was there anything else he wanted to take? A toy? Something to play with the other children? No, he c…[Read more]

I’m late to this debate, but it’s a very interesting one, so I hope no-one minds me resurrecting it.

My view on this is very utilitarian (I think), in that I always – consciously or unconsciously – try to work out whether the value of the book/music/art/movie/whatever is greater to me than the cost of reading/listening/watching it.

And the…[Read more]

Very little time this week, so throwing this one up before I read it again and spot all the errors!!

Enter the darkness

One hundred days, of which this is the first. We stand in snow that has crusted metallic overnight, not yet deep although that will come tomorrow, I think. It is eleven forty-five and we stand in a ragged line at the edge of…[Read more]

Of course, I hadn’t fully considered how many cases there are until I started this. For instance, I read We Need to Talk About Kevin long before I knew anything about Lionel Shriver – possibly before she had begun the process of disseminating her curious bag of libertarian views* across the media and the web. I still consider it a beautifully…[Read more]

Just seen an interesting twist on this. A bookshop is making a donation to a charity supporting trans kids every time they sell a book by JK Rowling

I agree with what you say, Raine. I should have clarified what I meant by problematic. For instance there are readers who boycott writers just on someone else’s sayso – I think you should always do your due dillifence and try to find out the whole story in as far as you can. Three independant sources of verification and I won’t boycott a book…[Read more]

I guess the line I draw with this is slightly different – it kind of depends if the work is current or not (or still within copyright, I guess). Partly because I don’t want to financially benefit anyone whose beliefs I find harmful (and that includes Roald Dahl’s estate). It feels like a condoning of their views to say ‘yeah you are hateful to x…[Read more]

This is something that I end up discussing a lot with my co-dragon on Dissecting Dragons. Ultimately, I think it’s fine to read and enjoy problematic art by problematic artists. The important thing is that you are questioning both within your own mind. I’ve boycotted certain YA authors because they’ve been involved in horrific online bullyimg…[Read more]

One of the more bizarre aspects of Social Media is that Michael Rosen has indeed been labeled as an antisemite, and the ‘wrong kind’ of Jew. In fact, just a couple of months after the publication of his book The Missing: The True Story of My Family in World War II, which investigates the loss of family members in the holocaust, Rachel Riley lumped…[Read more]

I have to agree with Ath, Daeds: you are not a bad human being.

Since antisemitism has been mentioned, I’d like to highlight another problem of distinction (or lack of it). I’ve long suspected that the apparently endless fuss about antisemitism in the Labour party is due (apart, of course, from people finding any excuse they can to vilify Labour)…[Read more]