Emma Robinson

Thank you Raine. Yes it turned out to be a pretty cunning ploy.

Oh Hilary! I was alerted to this thread by Ath. I can see you’re taking this well but I know how much it must hurt. I’m going to try to take a step back and see where the agent might have been coming from. Don’t shout at me!

Agents love books, of course, and get very excited when they are part of the process that leads to publication. For some,…[Read more]

Wow, thanks Libby! Well done to the other participants. I’ll think up some devilishly difficult competition for March and post later tomorrow.

How incredibly insensitive of her, Hilary. Of course you were excited and expecting something after being asked to meet her. What on earth was the agent thinking? But, as others have said, there mat be a positive side. Perhaps give yourself time to get some distance then decide if her suggested revision are for you or not.

And Janette – another…[Read more]

I just posted something which seems to have disappeared. Probably my error.

In brief, I liked this Literary Friction podcast about how we judge people by what they read.

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/literary-friction-minisode-three/id1000387053?i=1000433931359

New Day

The smoke from cooking fires lay like a grey blanket over Alexandra township and a tangerine sun rose behind it, then burst clear and threw its warming mantle over the land. The windows of the high-rise buildings on the distant Johannesburg skyline glinted like slabs of molten gold. A typical autumn dawn on the highveld but this was not a…[Read more]

A brief reminder for potential participants that we’re half way through the month. Though as it’s a leap year we do get an extra day.

An author’s hypocrisy, offensiveness, crassness or general liverish misanthropy doesn’t normally put me off reading them. It depends what the benefits might be. Good writing, insights I might otherwise not acquire, my own curiosity – all are reasons to go ahead. There are some blocks, and adding money to the Roald Dahl estate is one of them.…[Read more]

There are also examples in art – Paul Gauguin, Picasso and Freud, for example, were not particularly nice folk, it seems.
If a writer’s work doesn’t reflect his obnoxious views, does that make it OK? Or if his views are expressed in a work of fiction and not an educational piece?
Some very good people write fiction that contains extreme views, but…[Read more]

A good question though, John.

No problem @Libby, it was a flippant remark on my part, not intended to be taken seriously.

Many thanks, @daedalus.

Having thought about it a bit more, I’m going to restrict entries to one per person.

Although lots of competitions allow multiple entries I think that as the Den monthly competitions are small, double entries would skew the chance of winning too much in a double entrant’s favour. If several people were likely to post two…[Read more]

Personally I think that would be fine, John. I can’t see anything in the rules against it. I don’t think you’d need a pseudonym either.

But before you go ahead I’ll check with a higher authority. @daedalus – over to you, please!

I have two pieces nearly done but I don’t now which of them to enter. Maybe I’ll enter both, one under a pseudonym. Would that be cheating?

Thanks @KazG. Your thoughts on this are comforting. I was worried if I had to pull back and simplify more I might lose the voice, but I wanted to know if I needed to do a major edit on this aspect or not. I’ll stop worrying about it now.

But, as always, the feedback has been great at throwing up some other issues, so I shall get to work on Pix’s…[Read more]

I had a sticky scene that wasn’t working Squidge, and after some time away from it I reread and thought D’oh, of course she wouldn’t react like that. She’d be angry. It’s funny how the characters become real people in our heads.

Thanks for the heads up about Kingstone. I shall go take a look.

It’s still possible to get in close, even using third person. It’s a bit of a knack, to get into your character’s head in this way – I often find myself rewriting complete paras when editing, because by the end of the book I’m so familiar with my character I can tell how they’re going to react, what they’re feeling or thinking. It’s a weird place…[Read more]