Whisks

That’s publication with an ‘n’

Golden Egg Academy. Year long course for children’s writers aimed at improving your chances of publicatio and my last attempt at improving Pan. Google the GEA Foundation course…

What horror stories have you heard? (Then we can think how to avoid them!)

Also while keeping an open mind to the feedback you receive, don’t forget you’re in charge and you can ‘Accept, adapt, reject’. You don’t have to take on board all advice you’re given and the best way to decide what is and isn’t useful is to read feedback and then give yourself time to think about it, coming back to it after a little break with a…[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]

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.

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

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]

Live and let live, tha’s mah motto.
Welcome Thea! How is your writing going??

Can I add something extra to this list, Jules?

By all means, give examples of how differently something could be written when you give feedback – sometimes seeing the work written differently helps you as the author to understand what difference that kind of change could make to your story. But don’t be tempted to completely rewrite the whole…[Read more]

My agent experience is somewhat limited, but I’d add that it’s not the end of the world if you don’t get one.

Although I worked with an agent for two/three years, when she decided not to work with me any further (bearing in mind that nothing was signed between us in all that time) it gave me the freedom to strike out on my own. Course, I…[Read more]

Thank you for this, Richard. I enjoyed reading about Cabell, who I’d never heard of. You convey a great flavour of the man and his writing. He doesn’t sound like my cup of tea tbh. I hope you’re going to post some more literary byways and also more of your railway and suchlike stories…