RichardB

Ooh, you cynical old thing, you.

Congrats! Talent will out, it seems. Sorry I won’t be there to cheer you on.

Spooky? Yes, on my occasional visits I used to feel like Miss Havisham in Great Expectations.

Aaah! Hi Jackie, nice to (virtually) see you again. The group died some while back, after carrying on for a year or two with just the three of us: me, Peter and Lins. I haven’t heard from either in yonks.

I’ve written another novel since, a rather dark crime thriller, but maybe it’s time to return to my first love (as it were).

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.

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.

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]

The trouble with ‘sooner or later’ for me is that I’m already (let’s face it) knocking on seventy. For me, ‘later’ probably means not at all.

I’ve had positive MS assessments on two MSs (in the case of the second one I was told it was ‘an incredibly powerful and engaging story that really draws you in,’ which is pretty encouraging), but got absolute apathy from agents with both of them. Although I have the confidence that yes, I can write, I’m left with the feeling ‘What the hell do I…[Read more]

It’s worth reminding ourselves here of Neil Gaiman’s famous quote:

‘When someone tells you something isn’t working, they are nearly always right. When they tell you how to fix it, they are nearly always wrong.’

Yes, there wasn’t much fantasy being written then, certainly not on the industrial scale we have today.

Obscure though Cabell is to the reading public, he has been quite influential in his genre. He nfluenced later writers of humorous fantasy like Jack Vance and Fritz Leiber, whose stories also feature protagonists who fall some way short of…[Read more]