Terrie

Another excellent blog, Richard. You got me to invest my beer-tokens in Keith Roberts and now it looks like I’ll be blowing the dust off my wallet for James Cabell.

Totally barking, Ath, but very very well done!

MPO is that if the cloud goes then all communication with participants goes too and you aren’t responsible for that. Attempting to continue with a subset wouldn’t be the same competition, would it?

One issue I can foresee with moving the competition here is that when it closes for entries, we may well have entrants who do not wish to join another forum in order to participate. Also, I don’t have a way to contact all members except via the Cloud should it go toes skywards. I think I will be backing up topics and the wall as we go along once…[Read more]

I found the Cloud has been slower and more erratic than ever over last few days. Could be coincidental or coukd be increased activity I guess. Suggest that everyone keeps a record of their choices and the story when it comes to it, just in case.

I was wondering that, but it was happening to me just as much before the announcement.

Without wishing to sound too pessimistic, what happens if the Cloud finally breaks beyond fixing before the conclusion of the challenge?

Sounds interesting – will look it up

Thanks PB – I realised when I blogged about this on the Cloud it was almost a couple of years ago and there had been some significant developments by then. I’ll put something in the Lifeboat in the next couple of days

Ah! Now I understand. Welcome Elle/L, good to see you

Fascinating stuff Richard. Not an author I recall coming across, though the title quotation is familar. It soulds as though he had throughly subverted many of the common tropes of fantasy before that genre really got going.

Yes. It’s one of the little snarls to be untangled – that sticky topics show in a sub forum even though they are located in a separate forum.

I see the lifeboat FAQ and the house rules thread as well as this topic and the creitique FAQ

Yes. Excellent point, Squidge. When monkeying around with someone else’s work, it’s important to always remember that your ideas and the author’s ideas may not mesh. Any rewriting should be done sparingly, strictly as an example (unless the author requests otherwise) and the power should always be returned to the author when you’ve finished.

My agent experience is sh!te, so I can’t help much except to say that, so long as you don’t utterly muck up the cover letter, it shouldn’t matter hugely. I honestly believe that any agent who likes your work will like it regardless of the cover letter, and any agent who dislikes you because of your cover letter regardless of the quality of the…[Read more]