Tony Lyttle

Oh Hilary! I was alerted to this thread by Ath. I can see you’re taking this well but I know how much it must hurt. I’m going to try to take a step back and see where the agent might have been coming from. Don’t shout at me!

Agents love books, of course, and get very excited when they are part of the process that leads to publication. For some,…[Read more]

Jeez that’s shocking behaviour. Both from your agent @Hilary and @janette.
I’ve never got that close – I mean, I’ve had full requests but no more than that – but I’d have thought you could at least rely on agents to be honest.
We’ve all been blanked on a submission – which is par for the course, even if I don’t particularly like it. But to bring…[Read more]

Wow, thanks Libby! Well done to the other participants. I’ll think up some devilishly difficult competition for March and post later tomorrow.

Thank you everyone for your solidarity and kind comments about my writing, and for the encouragement to realise all the positives in this tale as well. And, @janette, for someone not to reply properly having suggested revisions – that is, indeed, unprofessional.

I am taking a step back from that experience and that novel, and working on the…[Read more]

Incidentally, as this year I am coasting towards the age where I am ‘losing my hair’, and wondering whether I will be locked out at quarter to three (never mind getting a bottle of wine for my birthday or a Valentine’s card), I suppose I should resign myself to joining that league of elderly no-hopers that includes Hilary Mantel, Philip Pullman…[Read more]

To be fair, she didn’t say it was about representation. I just thought/hoped it would be. She said it was to discuss suggested revisions and how we might work together. As well as the thing about commercial/literary, there were so many aspects of the book that she thought didn’t work, I even asked her why she had wanted to meet me and she said…[Read more]

I sort of worry a bit when I see agents pushing writers this way. In fact, my hackles start to hack or rise or whatever they’d do if I had them. Book Club fiction is Literary Fiction that agents reckon they should be able to sell better than average. As for this splitting of work into ever more categories as though this is some kind of scientific…[Read more]

Rachel agreed, in the end, to a bath.

The water was hot. There were bubbles. The scent made her think of purple.

She closed her eyes. Lowered herself, let her hands float, slid down until her head was under water. She let the breath go out of her and waited. Slowly, she pushed herself back up. Water dripped from her face, her hair. Steam…[Read more]

I’m late to this debate, but it’s a very interesting one, so I hope no-one minds me resurrecting it.

My view on this is very utilitarian (I think), in that I always – consciously or unconsciously – try to work out whether the value of the book/music/art/movie/whatever is greater to me than the cost of reading/listening/watching it.

And the…[Read more]

Of course, I hadn’t fully considered how many cases there are until I started this. For instance, I read We Need to Talk About Kevin long before I knew anything about Lionel Shriver – possibly before she had begun the process of disseminating her curious bag of libertarian views* across the media and the web. I still consider it a beautifully…[Read more]

New Day

The smoke from cooking fires lay like a grey blanket over Alexandra township and a tangerine sun rose behind it, then burst clear and threw its warming mantle over the land. The windows of the high-rise buildings on the distant Johannesburg skyline glinted like slabs of molten gold. A typical autumn dawn on the highveld but this was not a…[Read more]

Just seen an interesting twist on this. A bookshop is making a donation to a charity supporting trans kids every time they sell a book by JK Rowling

I agree with what you say, Raine. I should have clarified what I meant by problematic. For instance there are readers who boycott writers just on someone else’s sayso – I think you should always do your due dillifence and try to find out the whole story in as far as you can. Three independant sources of verification and I won’t boycott a book…[Read more]

This is something that I end up discussing a lot with my co-dragon on Dissecting Dragons. Ultimately, I think it’s fine to read and enjoy problematic art by problematic artists. The important thing is that you are questioning both within your own mind. I’ve boycotted certain YA authors because they’ve been involved in horrific online bullyimg…[Read more]

One of the more bizarre aspects of Social Media is that Michael Rosen has indeed been labeled as an antisemite, and the ‘wrong kind’ of Jew. In fact, just a couple of months after the publication of his book The Missing: The True Story of My Family in World War II, which investigates the loss of family members in the holocaust, Rachel Riley lumped…[Read more]

I wouldn’t put up with a thousandth of the crap Michael Rosen gets every single day for all the tea in China. The man is.. I was going to say saint, but you know what I mean. I didn’t mean you to alter or amend the original blog by the way, it’s at the very least a widespread view of Dahl and I wouldn’t say it was any less valid than mine (and I…[Read more]

You are not A BAD HUMAN BEING in spite of your assertion, and I have to point out that I am never wrong about these things. I note what you say, that I have no evidence other than a few sensational articles to confirm the smears, and most of all that he has been forgiven by Michael Rosen* He stays in my blog but with an amended text. I would love…[Read more]

I know I’m a bad human being, but still. I admit the Roald Dahl thing caused me a great deal of distress – not least because some of the articles circulating about him in the last few years contain a whole lot of horrible smears as well as the couple of horrible facts. But it’s difficult to come out and say ‘well yes, he did say a couple of…[Read more]