Jim Bish

Without any other information I would assume the title was the name of the MC (or just possibly an invented country) and guess that it was YA or children’s fairy story or fantasy

Sometimes definitely control! E.g. ‘Suffering a tyrant may be bad but tyrannicide leads to civil war, which is worse’ – see Plutarch via Shakespeare via this morning’s ‘In Our Time’ 😉

As Orwell wrote ‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past’ – and to my mind, the past = the historical narrative =…[Read more]

The time between?
Between times?
The Time Snatcher of London Towns?
A shadow of time… (working on from Jonathan’s suggestions)
A shadow in time?

I really hate titles sometimes!;)

In the Shadow of the City
The City in Time’s Shadow
?

Brainstorming:

An Uneasy Homecoming.
After the Happy Ending.
The Missing Years.
Breaking apart.

Ooooh. I like The Time Stealer! But I’m also wondering, since this is meant to be a trilogy or a series, could you have two titles – one for the trilogy and one for each book. So it could be The Time Stealer Trilogy. The individual titles could possibly be linked in some way. Like the chess theme that runs through the titles of the books in…[Read more]

I like that way of putting it. Helpful.

I haven’t seen ‘Downsizing’ but it sounds like a film that is a bit overloaded with ideas and ends up getting lost among them.

I like the ‘Here Ends…’, but what to say is ending.

…the Seven Years of Pain
…the Seven Years of Separation.
Why not something like Seven Years Apart or The seven years of separation. The End Begins Here…? Just playing now!

I also wonder if some of the other themes are more relevant to the title? There are an awful lot of themes going…[Read more]

Interesting one. Titles can be hard. Sometimes a really perfect one will just present itself. Other times…

I was looking, as I’m sure you have, at a thesaurus to see if it was possible to simply replace ‘abduction’. The best I could do was ‘Here Ends the Absence’, or possibly ‘Here Ends the Departure’ which I’m not sure really does it.

Same moment. Same reaction, Sea!

Another possibility is that the waves were so big that in a trough the Solomon Brown literally hit the seabed. If I’m ever up Whitby way I’ll definitely see about a ride on their Watson lifeboat.

There’s a decent collection of historic lifeboats at the dockyard at Chatham. I’ve a feeling they have a couple of Watson-type boats there but it seems…[Read more]

Superb blog tinged with tragedy, and, as always told with clarity and sympathy. For all the improvements in hardware and technology, RNLI operations can still be phenomenally dangerous. Operating in those conditions, that close to shore… Reading the account reminded me of The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger (great book, but don’t bother with…[Read more]

Interesting. I think sometimes, ‘It’s not quite there yet’ can sound like an apology, when it’s actually the admittance of a mature (by which I mean you know yourself and your writing) author, who realises that something created in such a short space of time needs more work. I’ve done it myself!

But of course it takes time to build that…[Read more]

That should be IT didn’t disappoint!

Logged into the Den and saw that you’d written another of your fascinating blogs, Richard, so I went and made myself a cup of tea and settled down for a good read. I didn’t disappoint. Fascinating story and I must confess to having damp eyes at the end. You’ve got a real knack of telling these tales in an interesting and moving way. Thanks Jane

Interesting. If I’m asking people for feedback and it’s the first time for us both, I try to signal that I know the piece of work isn’t perfect/finished and that I am genuinely hoping to be told what doesn’t work. Is that self-deprecating? I don’t think so. But I wouldn’t express doubts in a cover letter because it does beg the question as to why…[Read more]

Thanks, Giselle. You’d do well to duck.

Ha, Kaz! Have you snuck into my house and been reading over my shoulder? That’s pretty much where I’d got to – thanks in no small part to this thread. I was avoiding the scene and the complicated POV didn’t help. However I think, by making it somehow trigger a flashback to the earlier scene where she is beaten up by her husband and making her feel…[Read more]