Daedalus

Interesting perspective, Andrew. It seems to me that an awful lot of ‘failure’ is not necessarily a failure in the writing, but a failure to direct the writing to the best audience – whether it be a competition, a magazine, an anthology (in short story terms), or an agent, a publisher or competition etc in novel terms. And a lot of that is down to…[Read more]

It’s so heartening that people in the industry are taking this seriously now. And good though it is that there are paid-for courses available, for someone with the knowledge and experience to offer a checking and advice service free of charge is really brilliant.

Wondering if you might be up for ploughing through a 150k m/s loaded with PTSD etc?…

At least the ghostwriting of books like O’Sullivan’s thriller will be keeping an author somewhere in gainful employment – and probably earning much more than if they had published it under their own name. If I’d got that gig I’d call it success

It’s undeniably scary when stuff like that happens, and you have my sympathy. In situations like this, staff training is worth its weight in gold. The trouble is that nobody really knows what to do in this kind of scenario when they are suddenly confronted with it, and can often either freeze up or make things worse. In a previous life I worked…[Read more]

The not-getting-shortlisted thing is tricky. I had one story that was shortlisted in a major competition. I worked on it a bit more and submitted it to a few other places…and was met with silence.

A failure of mine is to take each failure to heart while not believing that successes are real or worthy

I suspect there might be a difference between US and UK practice as far as copyright goes. In the UK, copyright is presupposed so you don’t need to do anything to assert it. In the US it may be a bit less clear cut

Indeed it is. Well done John. That’s an amazingly fast turnaround as well, they must have loved it

This is absolutely fantastic. What a brilliant resource

Histfic can definitely have mainstream appeal. Seems as though one of Juliet Mushens’ biggest successes as an agent recently was with The Miniaturist. Though I gather Juliet is interested in history. The blogpost about how that novel was pitched to her is interesting. I think the link was posted somewhere around here. Go for it