9 December 2019 - What's new
9 December 2019
- 'Dear Aspiring Writer, you are not ready. Stop. Put that finished story away and start another one. In a month, go back and look at the first story. RE-EDIT it. Then send it to a person you respect in the field who will be hard on you. Pray for many many many red marks. Fix them. Then put it away for two weeks. Work on something else. Finally, edit one last time. Now you are ready to sub your first work... Inez Kelley, author of Turn it Up, Myla by Moonlight, Jinxed and five other romance novels. Our Comment.
- My Say gives writers a chance to air their views about writing and the writer's life. So we have Natasha Mostert on typing 'The End', Mary Garden on writers' block, Timothy Hallinan on The Writing Session and Dominae Primus on WritersServices.
- Here's a detailed article on how to prepare Your submission package - 'Given the difficulty of getting agents and publishers to take on your work, it's really important to make sure that you present it in the best possible way. Less is more, so don't send a full manuscript, as it's very unlikely to be read. Far better to tempt them with a submission package that will leave them wanting to see the rest of the manuscript...'
- Our links: as we move into the 2020s there are plenty of reasons to celebrate the resurgence of the book, BBC - Culture - How reading has changed in the 2010s; the writer who, for four decades, has imagined the near future more convincingly than anyone else, How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real | The New Yorker; my grandmother read one novel in her life, Reading the Unpublished Novel My Mother Took 30 Years to Write | Literary Hub; and Fern Michaels is women's fiction royalty and a publishing legend, Grande Dame of Women's Fiction Marks a Career Milestone.
- As well as our highly-regarded Copy editing service, which will help you prepare your manuscript for submission or self-publishing, we have Manuscript Polishing, which provides a higher-level polishing service, English Language Editing for those for whom English is not a native language, our new Writer's edit, providing line-editing, and Proof-reading. Get the right level of editorial support for your needs. Our low-cost services represent exceptionally good value. Contact us to discuss what you want.
- More links: when our writing resists us - when it refuses to do as we hope - we often respond with ever more force, pushing it to bend to our will, What Your Draft (and Its Problems) Says About You | Literary Hub; the antithesis of a hardbitten banker or financier, How Hong Kong poet Mary Jean Chan is wowing Britain's literary circles with first collection, Flèche | South China Morning Post; and, a bit crass but rather fascinating, The 10 Richest Children's Authors Of All Time, Ranked By Net Worth.
- From our Endorsements page: ‘Absolutely first class job! Very professional. Thank you very much indeed. Wish I'd found you before, it would certainly have saved me a lot of unnecessary headaches. I'll now bin the rest of the editors I've so far dealt with, and hope to keep contact with you.' Steven Kocsis.
- 'Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.' Julian Barnes in our Writers' Quotes.