KazG

Ooh. Ooh. Maybe I really should. Bet I’ll find a load of things I want to change when I look at it again though. It’s been a while.

@RichardB

Hey Twitter, I would love, love, love to find both a fantastic historical fiction novel and a ghost story. So get sending / spreading the word please and make my summer great!

— Sarah Manning (@SarahManning123) July 4, 2018

Sarah Manning requested subs of ghost stories in July

Er, maybe I should dust off my other MS then? The one I put aside, after I was told (three or four years ago) I had no hope of getting it published because it was a ghost story?

Thanks for the kind words, Daeds.

BTW Kate, I love magical realism, and given that the latest trend in publishing is towards ghost stories (Silent Companions etc.), maybe it won’t be long before that’s the hot genre?

I know what you mean, Daeds, about the ‘oh crap’ moment where you see where you’ve been going wrong. But it feels so good once you grasp it!

Richard – FWIW, you also have us. One of the things I’d like the Den to be, as the Cloud has been at its best, is a place for mutual assistance, advice, support and so on. You may not have a presence on social media, but a lot of us do, and social media is as much about building a network as anything else. We can help you if you want to go down…[Read more]

I too have always tended to wing it with structure, as I have with so much else. But I’ve got so used to being told that I’ve been clever and thinking ‘But I just bunged it down that way because it felt right,’ that I’ve probably got a bit too confident. Perhaps I’d better look at those podcasts too.

As for the age thing, I’m aware that…[Read more]

Excellent point about craft, Philippa. I’ve always been rather, um…informal about how I approach structure etc but the more I learn, the more criticial I find it to be. I think you tend to improve naturally just by writing (and reading) more, but actively learning is essential. The problem I have with throwing myself into addressing matters of c…[Read more]