Mad Iguana

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

Oh goodness, yes – we are our own worst critics!!

On the cloud, we often talked about ‘failure’ and ‘success’ and how differently people perceived the definitions of them. So I completely understand that you view not being placed as failure – it was one of a whole range of responses we used to get.

Me – I enter very few comps because I hated…[Read more]

On the How to get an Agent thread, page 3. In any event, here is the course:
https://www.faberacademy.co.uk/creative-writing-courses/who-do-you-think-they-are-character-creative-writing-course-gic2.html

The course is horrendously expensive, and the course info is a little misleading in that the tutoring is only in the morning. Nevertheless, I,…[Read more]

@Bellam @PhilippaEast @Squidge Thanks for your kind words, but it’s difficult for a self-driven person not to be harsh with himself.

Definitely not failure if you’ve tried some comps – you had to write the bloomin’ entry first! And from experience, competitions can be a matter of luck as well as great writing – does the judge like your particular genre? Your style? I know from peer-judging comps on the cloud, my own preference for reading material comes through in the kind of…[Read more]

A New Dawn

A blood red sun rose through the smoke from a thousand cooking fires, smoke that hung like mist over distant Alexandra township. A typical African morning on the highveld, but this was not a typical day. Daniel and his mother stepped from the bus onto the dusty road and followed the other passengers. Daniel wished his father could be…[Read more]

@alanr, commiseration on the “failures”, but it’s never a failure to put your work out there and to try. Glad you got some useful feedback at your one–to-one and you’ve found a way to implement it

@bellam I am excited about the new computer. I do agree that we remain writers even when not physically writing. It’s nice that you can see that your…[Read more]

Hi @alanr. My hair IS kind of chestnut, but I wouldn’t call it vivid! So don’t think that was me…. Hope we will cross paths another time.

Yes @daedalus – I suspect there is a US / UK split. The writer I knew who kept putting “c”s on things was from the States.

I think I recall @Debi weighing in on the discussion previously to say no “c”…[Read more]

My significant failure this year has been to have written nothing.

I am not sure that there is much I can learn from that failure, but I have discovered that the desire to write is not one of the flash-in-the pan obsessions to which I am prone. The desire is still there, and I have valid reasons for the mojo loss.

I am hitting the half-century…[Read more]

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

@PhilippaEast That’s good to know. But I only recently took mine off, and fortunately before I sent my 50 pages off to agents.
When I started writing it, there was plenty of advice to include the “c”.

Just out of interest, at FOW18 (Sunday) did you have the chestnut hair? At one talk I sat behind a lady with vivid hair of that colour, and…[Read more]

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

Congrats! This is great.