Jonathan

Hi Alan 🙂 Welcome to the Den

Hi Alan, good to make your acquaintance

Superb blog, Skylark, and a great pleasure to read. I’ve wanted to go to the FoW for years, with it always a bit out of reach, but this year I really wanted to go for the sole reason of seeing your moment of triumph. (Not to mention hearing your words of wisdom). But there will be more such moments and I look forward to seeing them i…[Read more]

@kazg Yes! I’ve found several aspects of the publishing industry quite daunting and such a relief to go to my agent and say ‘Help!’ and she’s brilliant every time!

All the colour disappeared from her world the day she moved in with him.

It’s minimalist, he told her. A blank canvas.

Surely, a blank canvas exists for the sole purpose of being filled, she wanted to say.

But didn’t, because it was all too new, too fresh, too…him. And more than anything else, she wanted him.

As time went on she still…[Read more]

Yes definitely fine for everyone to post lists of blogs and/or books they found useful. I guess we can see what we get and if it starts to get clunky we can amend it to create master lists.

I can look at a plugin to display certain blog rss feeds on the sidebar if you like?

Failing that there’s a lot of writing blogs I’ve found useful. I was going to post a list of them in the lifeboat 🙂

I raised the same question earlier – Jules suggested putting it into the blogs like we used to, but do you mean the list of blogs we used to have on the side? It’d be lovely to have that, but I’d feel a bit funny about the Scribbles being quite so visible, because my blog certainly isn’t always about writing…

We’d also have to have some way of…[Read more]

Thanks, Daeds. It’s been an interesting exercise.

Only just got to this. Great stuff. Works by itself or could be part of something longer. I had a couple of comments and then I realised there was an updated version that had addressed them. Great voice, and I love Florence’s, ahem, sangfroid and acerbic wit.

Tiny editing thing – Medical Corps rather than Corp.

I really enjoy this Sophie. I thought it really came alive when we were inside the room and inside his head. Really compelling internal monologue, lots of info and hints at info contained within the that but none of it telegraphed. Just enough to intrigue and pull you in. You do this sort of ‘dark underbelly’ of society so well.

I think the oth…[Read more]

Thanks all 🙂

@vandemal, yes it IS Ava, though she’s changed a bit since you last saw her and is now gallivanting through Burlington Arcade in 1858…but she’s the same Ava at heart. And thank you! 🙂

That’s what I thought, @skylark, so it’s good to hear your experience. There is benefit at the business end, of course, but it’s also having…[Read more]

Thanks Philippa – that does all make sense! Sounds like I need to now combine the stakes of the challenge with the overall feel…

The inciting incident isn’t actually that she can/can’t make an orb; it’s the fact that a little later, she decides to practise in secret, drains her Power and needs to refill… and at THAT point, discovers something…[Read more]