Not In My Name has been released, and why that makes me happy (sort of)

Last year, I wrote about how having depression made the release of my novel Three Arachnids In A Warship just another thursday. The short version is: depression saps the joy from everything. Even something as monumental as a book launch - the theoretical end point of years of effort - is rendered as nothing. Void.

Well, I’m not depressed at the moment - or at least feeling less depressed, so it came as a surprise to me when Not In My Name came out and I felt a little excited. This is partly because my publisher have done really well at getting reviews for the thing. Instagram is the way to go, apparantly. I’ve got a bunch of lovely Zoomers reading my book and getting very concerned at the political state of the UK, which is a double win for me. Also, a bunch of my friends bought NIMN, which was very nice of them.

I’m not jumping for joy at the release of NIMN, mostly because I’m extremely ill right now. I’m struggling to write a hundred words a day. Still, I think this is the first time I’ve put a book out and actually felt something. That’s nice. Can you tell I’ve lost the thread of what I was talking about? I’m extremely ill.

The Benefits Of Submitting The Proper Way

Having your work rejected is like having a tiny needle dug into your skin. It hurts, but not much.

With my last few books, I took the shotgun approach to submissions, and sent out about forty submissions in the space of a month. That meant, when the rejections started coming in, it was like getting stuck by 2-3 needles every single day.

I got rejected this morning, and it was a little disappointing, but it really wasn’t too bad. The reason for this is - this time around, I’m submitting The Proper Way - in tiny batches. I have three submissions out in the wild currently, and I’ve lined up the next four for when those three fail.

That means that the tiny needle I felt at the latest rejection was easy to shrug off - I’ve got the next set of submissions to do. After that, I have another set. Keeping focussed on the next set of submissions is helping.

That said, once I get through the two (or maybe three) sets of submissions I have lined up, I’m going to have to face down the fact that yet another one of my books has failed to land me an agent, and that’s going to be pretty rough. Until then, things are going a little better this time around.

The Waiting

Agents, as we have previously established, agents get too many submissions to be able to properly assess them all. Estimations vary but from what I can gather, an agent at a good sized agency can recieve over a thousand submissions a month. This means that the odds of getting picked are very low, but it also means it can take ages to hear back from agents, if you ever hear at all.

I want to be clear: I’m not complaining about agents taking a while to get back to me. Agents have an extremely difficult job - sifting through the mountain of submissions they recieve every single day, trying to assess each one as well as they possibly can. It sounds like a nightmare. The submissions never stop coming. If I was an agent I probably would have burned out in my first year.

That being said, I find waiting to hear back from agents deeply frustrating. Some agencies are fastideous about sending out a rejection email as soon as they’ve considered your work. I love angencies like this, because it means you can strike them from the list and move on. Other agencies never get back to you, and you have to just assume you didn’t make the cut. Again, given the number of submissions agents recieve, this is an understandable policy to have, but it gets very frustrating when such agencies have a very long consideration period. The agencies I have submitted to have the following wait periods:

4-6 weeks

6-8 weeks

6-12 weeks

Three months. This sort of thing is why, previously, I’ve just submitted to every agent I wanted to in one go. What you’re supposed to do - what I’m doing this time - is carefully select agents and submit to them in small groups. I’m currently waiting to hear back from three agents before I can send my next batch of four out. All this basically means I’ll probably be carrying out the submissions process for this book for, I don’t know, eighteen months unless I get extremely lucky.

This is why I’m glad to have publicity for Not in My Name to do (reviews have started coming in, they’re pretty good), as well as the next book I’m working on. Still, the waiting is frustrating.

Garbled Thoughts: 10 Minute Brainstorm

My Chronic Fatigue is in high gear at the moment, but I actually have a thing to talk about which I find really useful. So, I’m sorry if this blog post is coming across as confused, but I am extremely confused right now. Disability. I hate it.

10 minutes.

That’s the thing we’re talking about today.

I follow this author podcast and the dude on that is doing prep for writing a novel on the podcast. An intimidating prospect to be sure but one of the things of his prep that interested me greatly was this:

Sit down and brainstorm for ten minutes. Do this for everything.

Over the last week, I have done these ten minute brainstorms for characters, during which I learned that one of my characters was a social activist prepper, and another loved to do magic tricks… both of which I was overjoyed to learn. I’ve gone from having broad character archetypes to having people with chrunchily specific lives. I also now have a big old list of magical creatures, magical prisons, locations, artefacts and other ephemera.

A good half of what I came up with I could have generated through normal means, but there’s something about sitting down, throwing out all other distractions and just free associating for ten minutes which really yields good results. Particularly if your disability is preventing you from working in other areas.

Submission Day

I’ve submitted my latest book to four agents. I now can’t do anything with it for between 4 and 12 weeks. I need to distract myself by working on my next book and not worrying that I’ve misspelled something on the 15th page, but I’m supposed to be being vaccinated in an hour. I haven’t had a lot of anxiety recently, thanks to something I’m not currently allowed to talk publically about, but today is made for anxiety. Was my agent letter too long? Are there errors in the manuscript my three rounds of checks didn’t catch? Was my opening snappy enough? I need to not worry about this stuff because there’s only so much I can check and check and check before I have to trust that I’ve made everything about as right as is possible.

Now, the waiting begins.

Wierd Headspace

At the moment, I am doing three things:

1. I am doing publicity for Not in My Name (due out March 20th)

2. I am in discussions with my mentor and her boss as to whether my next book is ready to be sent out to agents

3. I am doing pre-production for the book I plan to write next

Each of these comes with its own unique upsides and downsides, so lets run through them:

Publicity:

Upsides:

• It’s the culmination of a project which has been in motion since April 2019. I finally get to put a book out into the world which I worked really hard on.

• The publisher have been really good at working with me, so it feels like I have an actual partner in this enterprise. This makes the process feel less overwhelming and more like this book might actually go somewhere.

• I get to show off the publicity images I had comissioned ages ago for this book, which I love:

Downsides:

• Actually getting anyone to look at a book that’s not from a major publisher and/or doesn’t have a big name attached is highly frustrating. Hundreds of novels are published every single day and it’s impossible for reviewers to look at them all. Reviewers feel like they’re drowning in things to look at whilst people like me feel like we’re a firefly trying to get noticed at a fireworks display.

• Publicicity is something I take part in, because I’m a professional and it needs doing, but it’s not something I love. I love writing. I don’t love begging people to look at my work.

• Publicity is expensive. You pay for advertising, you pay to have your book put on blog tours. If you have money to burn, you pay for a publicisit. None of this garauntees any level of success. It’s capitalism at its worst - a whole industry of people who exist to take money from people who don’t have very much in the hope that they’ll be able to break through the noise. The noise in this case, is a whole load of other people doing much the same thing as you.

Prep for sending the next book out

Upsides:

• I love this next book and I have the tiniest amount of hope that it might actually get picked up by an agent. I think it really is that good.

Downsides:

• It won’t get picked up by an agent, so that hope is due to be dashed soon

• The book is currently being checked over by my mentor’s boss and she’s definitely going to ask for some changes. I don’t particularly want to make any changes as I’m outside of the head space I was in when I wrote that book, having had my depression cured a few months ago. I’ll still make the required changes, of course, because I’m a professional, but… one of the things about this industry is… no-one ever looks at a book and says ‘yeah, it’s good’. They always have things that need fixing.

  Paul Valéry once wrote “un ouvrage n’est jamais achevé . . . mais abandonné” which we can roughly translate to ‘a work is never completed… only abandoned;”. You can endlessly tinker with something and it will never be perfect, so having to make endless changes feels like treading water in a bit.

  That being said, if I do land an agent (which I won’t), she’ll ask for changes, and if that agent lands me a publisher, that publisher will ask for changes, so I’m trying to make peace with this… impatience. This frustration with tinkering with a project I consider wrapped.

  I need to make peace with this part of the process, partly because it’s inevitable and partly because the book isn’t perfect. If someone asks me to change something, I can probably come up with something even better than what was there in the first place.

Pre-Production

Upsides:

• The raw creative aspect of pre-production is very thrilling. I’m thinking about characters, character journeys, plot beats and themes. I’m pulling together image boards and watching videos about literary ideas. I’m getting really excited about telling this story with these characters in this world.

Downsides:

• The freeform nature of pre-production is scary. I’ve pulled together a bare bones plot summary comprising of twelve major plot beats I want to hit along the way. It feels very flimsy and characterless to me. This is because I’m just coming off a very fleshed out, very in depth project where I’m really proud of the story.

  I went back and re-read my notes from my last project, from when I was at around the same stage to comfort myself that pre-production is always like this. That’s how I write stories - I start with a bunch of bullet points and expand, and expand and expand over the course of years until I have this story I’m really proud of.

  The time isn’t what’s scaring me. The fear comes from the question - what if this story is less good than the last one? What if I’ll never recapture that magic?

  Those questions are perfectly natural. The only problem is I won’t know if I was right to be worried for months now, when I’ll have tens of thousands of words written and the story will be truly taking shape into something special, or maybe something bland and disappointing. Only time, and a lot of work, will tell.

  Still, at least it’s work I enjoy.

In summary

I hope you can appreciate that I’m feeling a lot of very odd things, as I try to balance these three aspects of the writing journey. I’ve got three different types of hope, three different types of frustration and three different types of weariness. This has all left me in a very wierd headspace.

Oh hey, that was the title of this entry. That’s neat.

Fun With Publicity

I’ve got a book coming out in March, which means I’m in the middle of a publicity blitz. This means doing facebook advertising and talking to a lot of people who do Blog Tours.

There’s this big open question which everyone in the creative industries asks at some point - how do you find a place for yourself when you’re competing against massive corperate advertising budgets. To solve this problem would be to solve capitalism, so it’s not happening any time soon (although if you’re interested in solving it, there’s a video on christian anarchism I’ve been watching recently which might interest you).

A solution to break through the noise is to do targeted advertising on Facebook - which can apparantly win elections and sway referenda, so there must be something to it, but it’s not quite that simple. Another solution is Blog Tours - a Blog Tour operator shops your book around various book blogs, trying to get you picked up for reviews, interviews and so on.

I’ve been having fun with these Blog Tour operators over the last few weeks because they keep asking me interesting questions. I won’t go into them here, because the whole point is people are supposed to find out the answers to the questions on these blogs, but I really enjoy being asked difficult questions about my work because it makes me think about the text in different ways, and really try and nail down what’s good about it.

A Realistic Approach To Writing Your First Novel

“But wait… what is this washing at my feet? Why it is a pen! And a waterproof sack containing thousands of sheets of paper! And now a book entitled ‘How to Write a Novel’! Surely I am being told something…

“’Chapter One. Stop reading this ‘How to Write a Novel’ book and start writing your novel. Chapter Two. Why are you still reading this book? Start writing your novel.’ And the remaining chapters are similar, though with more swearing.” – Pip Bin, Bleak Expectations, first broadcast 19 November 2009

The first time you try something, 99 times out of 100 you won’t be able to do it very well. You might find you have a surprising aptitude for it – I, for example, discovered I have a knack for throwing axes in 2012, for reasons too complicated to get into right now, but I definitely wasn’t a good axe thrower, I was just better than I expected.

You probably already know this. You know that if you decided to try out fencing, for example, you wouldn’t be able to fight well for months or, more likely, years. You wouldn’t expect to be able to speak Spanish after spending only a month learning the language. This is all a roundabout way of saying the first thing you write will be bad and there’s no way you can prevent this.

Writing is a skill, like any other, and it takes practice to get good at it. There are people whose first novels have been excellent, but these people are anomalies. It’s like winning the lottery: People do but you won’t.

Accepting this simple fact will make you a much better writer. I have friends who tried to write a novel, realised what they were writing was bad, gave up and never wrote again. If you accept your inexperience before going in, you can concentrate on exploring the craft. Do you enjoy the act of writing? Should you be writing novels at all? Should you be writing short stories or Role Playing Game scenarios?

CGP Grey released a video essay about how to engage in activities such as writing. To paraphrase: Rather than say to yourself: ‘This year, I will write a novel’, you should give yourself a theme. In this case, the theme would be ‘year of writing’. Then, make the time to write a manageable amount whenever you can. Precisely what you write doesn’t matter – you’re finding out what sort of writing you enjoy. It could be science fiction, it could be Nordic noir, it could be non-fiction, it could be anything at all. You won’t know until you try.

Surprising Answers

So, last week I was worried about my current project. Since then, I’ve been doing very little work on the novel except walking and thinking. I’m happy with the results - an hour’s walk a day with nothing else to think about throws up interesting results. What I’m really looking forward to is what a developmental editor is going to make of the thing…

Troublesome Drafts

I’ve got about 30,000 words into a draft of a book and I’ve got a nasty feeling I’ve made things way too complicated. The book I finished up last year had three main characters and two major secondaries. The one I’m working on now has… more than that. Let me just count:

A protagonist

A primary antagonist

A Lancer

Two slippery eels

One ordinary Jane

One moral distortor

That’s seven characters compared with five, which doesn’t seem like much, but they all have different motivations to juggle, and most of them are working against the protagonist. It’s possible that it’s not actually too complicated, but my protagonist needs someone to trust who she can be safe with.

And I actually have a character for that, interesting… I’ll think some more about this.

Welcome to ‘Thinking Aloud with Michael Coolwood’.

I do this a decent amount. I have a problem and can’t see a way through it until I set it out and go ‘Ooooh maybe that’s what’s going wrong…’

31/12/2020 - Beavering Away

Back when I was feeling a little healthier, I wrote a blog post on here about trying to write 500 words every day. I honestly can’t remember what I was writing at the time but it was either NIMN or THD. December has been an absolute disaster of a month - my chronic fatigue has been through the roof and I’ve been struggling to get any writing done at all. That being said, any writing is better than no writing. This means my next book is moving very very slowly, but it is moving. Small steps. Positive steps.

24/12/2020 - So, What Next?

In the new year, my mentor is going to check the changes we worked out together for my book. She’s going to check my submission materials - my agent letter and my synopsis. We’re going to work together to pull a list of agents together to submit to. I’m going to submit to those agents and they’re universally going to reject the manuscript. If I get exceptionally lucky, maybe one will ask to read the full thing. My mentor may have a backup list of agents to send the thing to, but they will reject the manuscript as well.

I don’t want this to sound like a game of PLOM (Poor Little Old Me), as I’ve talked about previously, this is just about numbers. A reader for the agency Conville & Walsh wrote a piece explaining that they recieve 200 manucripts a month and, from those, an agent will maybe take on 4 writers per year. That’s 4 manuscripts out of 2,400. To put in percentage terms, Conville & Walsh pick up 0.16666666666666669%. of the writers who submit to them. Now, as previously discussed, the odds of getting picked up aren’t actually that bad, because plenty of those 200 manuscripts per month will be very bad, but getting picked up is still phenominally unlikely.

So, with that in mind, what will I do with the book once it gets rejected by everyone?

Well, I could self publish the thing. I’ve done this before, with my celebrated* novel Drown the Witch. The thing about self publishing is it’s basically a way of taking a large pile of money and then getting rid of it as quickly as possible. At the bare minimum you’ll want a cover (decent cover artists are extremely expensive), and you should probably get the thing proof-read as well. If you want an audiobook you can say goodbye to £2,000. All that’s before you spend any money promoting the thing.

I learned a lot from self-publishing Drown the Witch but I’m in two minds about trying again unless my mentor and I decide it’s the right way to go. That leaves me with limited options. Unless some sort of inspiration strikes, I’ll probably wind up sitting on the thing, like I did with the last book that got rejected. Drown the Witch, this current book and the last one are all set in the same universe, with minor connections, so my hope is, if one gets picked up, I can say ‘heeey, you like that book? Well I also have these set in the same world. You want them?’. This may be overly optimistic.

So, to cut a long story short: what happens with the next book gets rejected by everyone? Crying. Probably lots of crying. It’s going to hurt. Once I’m done crying, I’ll hopefully be able to carry on writing the book I’m working on now. Maybe that one will see more success.

*Most people who have read it enjoyed the thing - it’s got pretty solid reviews on Audible and Gooddreads, but I’ve made maybe £200 from the thing since its release in 2018. So it may be cellebrated but it’s not commercially succesful.

17/12/2020 - The Benefits of Talking Things Out

I’m plugging away at the current book. I’m 20,000 words in and should have Act 1 wrapped up sometime within the next 5,000 words or so. What I’m finding challenging is - this book has so many moving parts. There are six different groups of people, all of whom are stuck in the same situation, all of whome want different things (well, some want a McGuffin but they all want it for different reasons), and it’s… it’s just a lot.

I got stuck on one tiny plot event and I couldn’t see my way past it… so I talked to my wife about it.

My wife and I used to write together - comedy sketches at university and then a few full scripts in our first years of adult life, which didn’t go anywhere. She’s also extremely clever - certainly more inteligent than me in several areas. As a result, working through plot problems with her usually leads to good results. This also works with editors, and I think it’s something specific about talking.

The editor who I walked away from earlier this year, the one who point blank refused to explain her reasoning for making certain recommendations, also refused to do skype conversations to go over points. She has mental health problems so, sure, but it meant that past a certain point I couldn’t really understand what she wanted me to do. There’s something very specific about the back and forth of:

Them: I want you to do this.

You: But if I do that, then this happens.

Them: Ah. Okay, but we need THIS because the story is currently lacking element X

You: Could we get element X from solution A, B or C?

Them: Solutions A and B sound like they’d cause more trouble than it’d be worth, but let’s have a chat about C, because you might be onto something there…

You can get this same effect from email, but it’s much harder because you have to really hope that you’re focussing on the right things. It’s also really easy for one person to get the wrong end of the stick. Talking: writers might not like it, but it really helps.

10/12/2020 - Post Meeting Funtimes

My meeting went as well as it possibly could have - I made two pages of notes in an a5 notepad. Ten individual changes across a 97,000 word book which resulted in about a thousand words being added to the document, and maybe 600 cut. For an author, that’s the equivilent of being thrown a parade. So I’ve made the changes, found some agents and am waiting for my mentor to give the results a read in the new year.

12/11/2020 - Art is Never Completed, Only Abandoned

I have a short attention span. Once I spend a certain amount of time on a project, I get bored and want to move on. Thankfully I tend to only want to do this once I’ve got a project into a good state, otherwise I’d have the opening chapter of 50 novels sitting on my hard drive. My short attention span has led to me writing a bunch of books. It’s also led to me moving on from a bunch of projects without spending enough time polishing them. Something I continue to struggle with is knowing where that line is, between abandoning a project too early, and spending so long on it I get completely fed up with the thing. I hate several of my books because I spent too long working on them. I’m utterly sick of anything to do with them. Others haven’t fared as badly, and I’m not 100% sure where the line between those projects is.

05/11/2020 - A&E

I spent all day in A&E today and am going back at 8am tomorrow so no blog entry today booo

29/10/2020 - Never Give Up

This is another emergency blog post that I’m writing well in advance because my health is being particularly terrible at the moment. This is about the sentiment that I shouldn’t give up on writing because I’m not getting anywhere.

I’ve written a bunch of books and submitted a load to agents. None have got anywhere. Now, every book I have submitted so far was not ready to be submitted.  Even the last book I submitted was no-where near as well edited as I would have liked (though at the time I thought it was great). It’s easy to put my failure to get picked up at the feet of these projects being less than great - although, to be clear, I think my work is pretty consistently, at the very least good.  The thing is, this can’t be all that’s going on, because plenty of absolute crap gets picked up by agents every day. This is an artistic, subjective medium. Artistic, subjective judgements happen, and this leads to crap getting picked up. Nothing can or should be done about this.

Generally, whether you get picked up by an agent, and see any success beyond that, is about a few things:

1)      Luck

I didn’t want to start with this point because it makes me sound bitter, but it is an unspoken truth of this industry that you could have the single best book ever written, and if you don’t get extremely lucky, you still won’t get picked up. This is because agents get hundreds of submissions every day and there’s no way to properly assess them all without having a breakdown. The only way agents can get through their pile is by making a lot of snap judgements. As such, your submission not only needs to be very good, it also needs to catch the right agent in the right way. That requires luck. However, you can reduce how much luck you need by:

2)      Having a good product with which to lure agents in

If we lived in a perfect (or even mildly okay) world, the quality of a work would be the main factor in whether it did or didn’t get picked up. And, to be clear again, the quality of all the work I have submitted to agents in the past was not up to a high enough standard. I’m working on this, but it’s important to say because otherwise I come across as bitter. Still, we do not live in a perfect world, we live in a capitalist hellscape. So, what else can you do to increase your chances of getting published?

3)      Spinning the Wheel of Fate Multiple Times

How do you increase your chances of winning the lottery? Play more than once. The same is true for getting your work picked up. Did your first book not go anywhere? Write another. This is extremely middle class advice – most people can’t afford to do this. Writing books is very expensive, but if you can afford to, and you have the time, write more than one book. Spin the wheel again.

That last point is, when you get right down to it, why ‘don’t give up on your dream’ is actually a pretty good piece of advice. It’s also a terrible piece of advice for most people.

The reason for this is simple: You could work your entire life perfecting your writing, creating the most amazing works of fiction you possibly could, and you probably still won’t get anywhere, because luck is such an important factor in what does and doesn’t get picked up.

Genuinely, it is not a good idea to try and be a professional writer. Or a professional creative of any sort. The vast, vast majority of people who try end up failing, dropping out and going back to their day job. The reason I, personally, have not given up already, dropped out and gone back to my day job is I am too ill to hold down a day job. Writing is the only thing I can consistently do, even when I’m ill. This means it’s… what I’m doing. Even though it’s futile.

So, that being the case, let’s return to the advice ‘never give up’. As discussed, it’s both good and terrible advice. It’s also advice that doesn’t (in my opinion) really help. It takes a truly stunning amount of emotional energy to get a book to a good enough state to even submit to an agent. I have been working on the book I’m currently finishing up for the last two and a half years. I’ve worked on other stuff in that time (including a whole other novel, due out in March 2021). To contrast this, the last book I submitted, the one that wasn’t ready, I worked on for just under two years.

It’s really hard to over state just how horrible it feels when a book you’ve spent two years working on gets rejected. But you keep going, and it happens again. And again. And again. The book I’m currently writing? The one that I’ve been working on for about 30 months? That’s probably going to get rejected as well. When it does, I’m going to want to quit.

As I’ve said, quitting in response to this book being rejected would actually be the smart move. I’ve written… I don’t know. Seven books now? I’ve genuinely lost track. Two have been published, two self-published and one will be published in March 2021. The other books didn’t go anywhere and I held onto them in the hope I can resurrect them in the future. When you’ve tried something seven times and have seen really quite minimal success, the right thing to do is quit. Maybe I’m just really bad at this writing thing. Have I thought about that? I might just not be cut out for it. I certainly don’t help myself a lot of the time. I’ve joined Twitter twice to promote my work and ended up quitting both times (the second time being remarkably shitty to a friend because they tried to talk me out of quitting).

The thing is…

The thing is, if I quit after this current book is rejected, that would actually be a shame. The reason for this is: I have never been as good at writing as I am right now. I know how to plan books and how to structure them. I know my strengths and weaknesses as a writer – well, some of them. I know how to get the best out of my work by finding good editors and working with them effectively. This book I am working on currently is the first book when I got an editor on board at the point where writers are supposed to – at the developmental stage.

(The developmental stage of editing – the writer has written a first draft – it gets submitted to an editor who says ‘this works, this doesn’t, for the love of god, Michael, don’t give your protagonist a learning disability, it makes the book really hard to read’ and so on. This step is really, really important and led to me re-writing 80-90% of the book.)

In a very, very real way, the book I am currently writing is actually my first book.

It’s going to be really hard to not quit when this book I’m writing right now gets turned down. Thankfully, the book I want to write next is one I’ve wanted to get my teeth into for well over a year at this point. I’m looking forward to it, but I can’t afford to look forward to it so much I skimp on perfecting the current project.

So, the advice: ‘never give up’. It’s shit advice. It’s also true. It’s also wrong. It’s quantum advice. It’s wrong and correct at the same time. I went to a stand up show by the comedian Mae Martin and someone in the audience asked her (it was a Q&A show), ‘how do you know when you should give up’. She said something along the lines of ‘when you’re starving because you’ve spent all your money on your projects’.

This is obviously extreme advice, and everyone is different. For me, and maybe only for me, there’s something to it.

22/10/2020 - When To Disregard An Editor’s Advice

One thing I’m still trying to get a handle on is when to disregard an editor’s advice. For my last book, someone recommended that I start the story in the backstory of the characters, which I disregarded because the backstory has nothing really to do with the story. In the two years since that advice, I’ve concluded that it might have been correct, not because it’s necessarily crucial to the story, but because it would have provided a sense of normalcy from which the story would then deviate. This sense of normalcy isn’t 100% necessary but in a fantasy novel it sure helps. It eases the reader in a bit. The problem was the editor didn’t say ‘you should include this because it’s a good idea to start a story like this with a sense of normalcy from which you’ll then deviate’, she just said it’d be nice to see. One thing I’m learning about editors is they often have very good ideas and are completely terrible at expressing why they’re good ideas, so to an author they sound like complete gibberish.

This was why I ended up parting ways with one particular editor, who was a certified genius in some areas, but whenever I queried any of her points, I didn’t get an explanation for why the point was important, I just got told to trust her and/or the process. Being a little older and possibly wiser, this is now a massive red flag to me. Still, even if it was a reasonable thing to say (which it isn’t), it would still be a bad thing for an editor to say. The reason being: Let’s say an editor tells you to change your main character to a llama. This is briliant advice but you don’t know why because the editor won’t tell you. So you go through and make the main character a llama, but the change hasn’t brought about the effect the editor wanted, because she didn’t tell you the function changing the character into a llama was supposed to serve. To put it another way, if you don’t know why you’re changing something, you won’t know what direction to take the new matieral in.

15/10/2020 - Hospital

Spent large parts of this week in hospital so not getting masses of writing done. Did have a chat with my editor where we worked through some issues with a book. It’s lovely to talk to editors over Skype. Mostly I talk to them over email but you lose so much energy and potential for brainstorming in text. It’s nice to have formal reports in text so you can digest at your own pace and come back to areas again and again but really when troubleshooting the only way I find that really works is in person or Skype.

08/10/2020 - Still Forked

Still unbelievably tired. Am on the waiting list for a sleep study but a decade of the Conservative Party stripping funding away from the health service combined with Covid means I have no idea when the study will actually happen. I’m still having fun on my writing course. here’s a fun titbit I learned:

When writing your synopsis (the one page plot summary you send to agents along with your sample pages), make sure the end of one paragraph has something to do with the start of the next one. So don’t go:

“[end of paragraph 1]…Sarah decides to leave Brooklyn for good due to her addiction to dog biscuits.

[start of paragraph 2] Rachel joins the PKK in defiance of her father’s wishes…”

Those sentences don’t have anything to do with each other, so it looks like they’re unrelated events. A better version might be:

“[end of paragraph 1]…Sarah decides to leave Brooklyn for good due to her addiction to dog biscuits.

[start of paragraph 2] Sarah’s addiction to dog biscuits focuses Rachel on what she wants from life, so she joins the PKK in defiance of her father’s wishes…”