Crazy, I know, but I’ve been working on Valentine Klimt and the Revolution of Love for three years now, inspiration having struck on 14th Feb 2022… to celebrate, here’s a small blog post: Valentine’s Day … if you’ll pardon the pun.

Yes… interesting. Seeing the same story from both a male and a female point of view, but also a male and female author’s take on the story. You’d have to find a collaborator you aligned with, but whose take was interestingly different. No point in a cosy tea-and-scones mystery author nestling up to a square-jawed testosterone thriller-boy ……

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Lots to like here – as a pitch, it’s coherant and I can ‘place’ the whole thing – tone, readership, etc., immediately.

I’d only say that based on the ‘synopsis’ paragraph, it does feel like there’s a disconnect in the plot between the ‘good times’ adventure the three characters share, and the sudden ‘danger’ at the end. I’d expect the novel (or…

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The title says it all. It’s been another rollercoaster year in writing, and just like previous years, it’s my writing friends, here and elsewhere (but mainly here) I have to thank for all the positives.

More wittering on the subject from me here (https://replaceableme.substack.com/p/something-to-say-about-christmas), but the digested read,…

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Spur! Spur on! Then spur on again!

It’s only my opinion, but you’re not editing a novel, you’re learning craft. Every iteration is not only a ratchet-up of this piece of writing but also the next piece of writing and the next. You can’t unknow what you now know.

Of course you’re a writer, and judging by how seriously you’re taking it, a bloody good…

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I thought of ‘the past might be buried – but it’s not quite dead’.

For the rest, the pitch needs to ‘cohere’. How is Oxford a PI if this is his first case? (And how can this be routine, if it’s his first?) Is he a ‘wannabe’ or an ex-cop with some real cred? What’s the connection with Oxford’s wife?

Can we have a hint of where we are? The names give…

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Hi All,

My goal (he announces, bravely), is to complete 30k words of my (latest) work-in-progress The God of Broken Things, but also to make a passable synopsis, so I have some idea of where the story actually leads. I’ve been waiting for inspiration to strike re. that last one, but it looks like inspiration has gone on strike…

PS: It’s November…

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Echoing Dave’s point 3 here – having spent an amusing weekend playing around with DALL-E, I conclude the most you’ll ever get out of it is a sketchy prototype you can take to your cover designer as a prompt. The cover designers have a secure job, I reckon.

(See the awful truth here.)

I dug out my dusty copy of Erebus by Michael Palin this week to answer another query, and that turned out to be a mix of past and present tense. It kind of makes sense that interviews are ‘now’ and the events we’re talking about are (neccessarily) ‘then’. As ever, it’s the way you do it that counts. The transitions would be key.

Calm, Rose, calm. All stress moments are a learning opportunity. Although, it sounds like BT need some learning, too. I wonder why BT’s digital voice offering is so attractive – the rest of the world seems to have adopted What’sApp en masse – the house telephone never gets used round here – and all we need is a decent internet connection (KPN, in…

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Hi,

I had to chip in here, because I had exactly the same dilemma – and I think I gleaned useful advice from this thread a few months ago. Building genuine community – that’s a sentiment I agree with.

I held off putting up any kind of web-presence until I had something genuine to talk about (which was my short story, Munch’s Piano – published in Fict…

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Thank you Karen! I’m glowing with all the positive feedback (here and elsewhere) and this is the icing on the cake.

1944? Munch died in January, and I only think it must have seemed like the darkness would never end, in occupied Europe (a few Russian successes and the dambusters notwithstanding). From our end of the time machine, a different…

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Hi Rose,

You have me weighing every word – especially the abstruseness of the concept. Somebody keeps accusing me of doing everything the hard way, so making the reader work too hard might just be another example of the same. I was going to say that ‘the day job’ (which is currently my rock-and-roll space opera WIP) has less potential to overwork…

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Thank you, Raymonde!

Thank you, Laure. Coming from you, that’s a big complement indeed!

Hi. A little postscript on the ‘trying to get published’ story: my big plan was to work on getting short stories published in literary magazines and with that on my writing CV to begin the query treadmill again.

At least the first part of that is working brilliantly: my short story, Munch’s Piano, is published in Fictive Dream today. It’s taken…

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Lost for words is not a good look for a writer, but here I am.

My short story, Munch’s Piano, is published in Fictive Dream today:

https://fictivedream.com/2024/07/28/munchs-piano/

Please, have a read and, if you like, give it a like (either on Fictive Dream or via their twitter). I’d really appreciate that. And, let me know here – what do you…

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For those of you that might be interested, I have some news…

https://open.substack.com/pub/replaceableme/p/getting-something-published?r=28ei0k&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

…and if you haven’t subscribed to my substack yet (https://replaceableme.substack.com), I can only say … please!

Forgive me. I’m still tweeting and bleating. I expect to have actual news next weekend (I was told to hold off for a week) … meanwhile, this. A dispatch from the querying trenches.

https://open.substack.com/pub/replaceableme/p/clapham-in-the-rain?r=28ei0k&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Ooh… spoiler alert! 🤣

Agree with Natalia. It’s less a question of the length of the chapter than of the scenes within it. Someone once told me a chapter should be a mini-novel in itself – in other words, a short story – and that gives us some sort of a guide. A scene will also be composed of ‘pieces’ (beginning, middle, end) and all the pieces will naturally fall to a…

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Congrats, Scott. It doesn’t get better than No.1 (except, getting another No.1). Do you have a link?

A little off-topic perhaps, but I do wonder whether the novella is going to be ‘in’ again pretty soon. Kindle, digital downloads (and Substack, of course) have separated the work from the constraints (practical and commercial) of the book-making trade and there must be any number of great stories that fall naturally at a word count much shorter…

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Yep. Same answer with different words. Most agents say they want the whole story, with spoilers. Whether that spoils their enjoyment of the work is their problem.

There are exceptions. I’ve come up against a couple of people who want a ‘cliffhanger ending’ to the synopsis, which is easy enough. And, deciding what they get in that case is easy too -…

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Interesting one. Writing is a mental game. Sometimes, the act of jotting down a reasonable note-form first draft makes it hard to edit (‘I don’t want to mess with that beautiful phrase!’), sometimes an apparently equally half-assed first attempt virtually invites you to edit it into shape.

I’ve also noticed a similar phenomenon to Rena’s whereby I…

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You don’t get rid of me that easily ;-). More news in the near future.

Out there is definitely where I am at the moment. I can’t thank you (and everyone) enough for all this support.

Thank you. Considering my previous comment, I’m soooo pleased you liked the image. More zany pastiches with hidden meanings to come.

I’m also out of my comfort zone… with the graphics, especially. But, we have to keep throwing ourselves in an ever deeper end, right? We’re writers. We can do it. 😉

Thank! Found you. Subscribed. Looking forward to reading…

Hi All,

I have some exciting news. Which I’m going to reveal, soon (he said being deliberately mysterious and milking it for all it’s worth).

Since it looks like things are finally moving a little in the direction of publishing (hint, hint), I’ve decided to do that Substack blog everyone’s been badgering me about for ages. Here goes:

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I’m with you, Rose. I’m regularly reduced to ‘I must be kidding myself’ (for example by a same-day rejection of a short story from a certain well-known magazine … I mean: same day? So… they looked at the title and laughed…?)

Fortunately, every time that happens, it’s followed by getting massively positive feedback from beta readers (a.k.a. members…

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Hi Jo,

If it helps, here’s my querying story: after receiving a shed-load of positive feedback (manuscript assessment, 121s and most importantly, readers, loads of) I’ve queried agents in batches of around ten over the last couple of years, and the responses have varied from the wildly enthusiastic (but ‘not for me’) to the usual form rejecti…

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Thanks for cheering me up on my day of depression, having received my eleventeen millionth rejection this week. I fear a pattern is emerging.

There’s clearly no way agentland is going to change its mind all of a sudden. Maybe the publishers are devoting all their resources to a (doomed) attempt to build an AI-author-bot to rule them all. (Have fun…

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Perhaps I shouldn’t influence you too much, but I went round the loop with this with my first novel. I had a manuscript assessment from a wonderful published author via Jericho, which was full of positives, but also pointers for improvements. Having worked on that for another year (or it felt like it), I went round the loop a second time with an…

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Enjoyable, and poignant. Love the descriptions – the detail, the dust. (I must say, this 250 words thing is sometimes frustrating… I see flashes of really good stuff, and want to read more!) I was rather thrown at ‘back then…’ – I don’t quite get what was happening ‘back then’ or why it was a repeating pattern. Perhaps this is just because I’m…

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Enjoyed this very much. But, doesn’t the last sentence rather pull one out of the narrative? Through the rest, your protagonist is with us in the moment, but in that last sentence he’s looking back from many years in the future. Perhaps this is an intentional technique in which case it might be nice to deliniate the then from the now (Emma…

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Yup, this is lovely. Heartfelt, emotional, genuine. There isn’t much setting, but if this is the end, there probably doesn’t need to be. I can just feel the struggles that have gone by in order for Kat to reach this point. Sounds like a great ending. (Agree with the editing suggestions, by the way.)

Great title also: evocative, simple, memorable.…

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Lovely. I particularly like the detail of the fingernail checking the scratchcard. I also liked Sam’s out-of-body experience (and especially tilting on a strange new axis). For myself, I’d keep the five words and try to find a way to live without ’tilting’ … this bit is already quite economical. Maybe the earlier part about an extra dimension…

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A title: A Very Valentine Christmas

A line or two about the book: Apologies. It’s a short story, purely for a laugh, and the time of year, extrapolated from Valentine Klimt and the Revolution of Love (still unpublished). If it turns out to be a horror/slasher story, it’ll be a cosy horror/slasher story (my struggle with genre continues).

A line or…

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This is lovely, alright. Particularly the ending. I did wonder about ‘fighting machine’ and ‘indelible mark’ … somewhat cliche? If you inject some more imaginative language at those points it might come alive. I’m particularly reminded of Churchill’s understanding words towards the appeasers of the 1930s – that he knew very well what modern…

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Allow me to be the first non-Karen to congratulate you on this. Really enjoyable. I didn’t know if ‘person’ could be ‘human’ to create a suitable distance. And pistons hissing? It sounds like a rather steam-punk robot, which might be interesting, if that’s the intention. Love the concept. Pitch-wise, how does it differ from Isaac Azimov’s…

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Hi All. Remember me? The observant amongst you will have noticed that it’s no longer November 24th, which just about sums it up for my NaNoWriMo efforts. This is as far as I’ve got, with big gaps to fill, but at least a solid idea of where all this baloney is heading… if I ever get time to write it.

Hope you’re all doing better than me.

Cheers,

Stuart.

A title: It’s Only The End Of The World

A line or two about the book. Faced with tax bills greater than the GDP of Finland, Blue Noise, the biggest band of 2068 must bury the hatchet to collaborate on their biggest concept-album yet: The Void.

A line or two about the scene. The Void turns out to be mainly Roger’s adolescent psychodrama therapy rel…

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It’s lovely, and beautifully *cold*.

I wondered if: ‘He’s like a worm, living inside an apple,’ and ‘He’s like a parasite, living inside a dead thing’ were both needed.

Also: Wellum looked at her. Yeah. We can guess. I *feel* him not making eye contact, fumbling in his pockets, looking for the right words. But it doesn’t say that.