Shadows of the Apt

…should have been the first line of the book. It isn’t. If I’d started in the midst of prehistory I’d never have got where I wanted to go. Fantasy stories are prone to have a past. Tolkien started it (1). Indeed, the Tolkien mould is very much the standard fantasy fare even now. The Tolkien past is a two-stage […]

As in the late Robert Jordan (1).   I never actually read any Jordan. He was always so ferociously ubiquitous. By the time I became aware of the phenomenon that was Robert Jordan, everyone around me was reading book 6 or 7 of The Wheel of Time and the utter weight of literature placed an effective barrier to […]

This is probably well known, almost certainly self-evident, but nonetheless…   Do not send the entire manuscript to people unless they’ve asked for it.   After all, the people who form the first line of defence against unsolicited authors, the publishing industry’s immune system, are busy. They have an awful lot of stuff come in to […]

Before I get on with the main business, a digression, also a confession.  While moving house I uncovered some mouldering old books, buried since the antediluvian eras when first they was writ. For long ages of man they had slumbered, the nightmares within their pages lost to recall, until I was fool enough to empty all those boxes that I’d […]

There are a lot of people out there who come under the general umbrella of publishing. Most of them will, be you the greatest writer in the world, have no interest whatsoever in your book. This may sound obvious. When you send off to Pig-focused Publishing Ltd and they write back saying, “Thank you for your epic […]

Well, not Redwall, obviously, and as previously stated, but it put me in mind of a peculiarity of terminology that’s come up.   So, not the book yet, despite repeated promises. Something’s been bugging me, so to speak…   For those that aren’t aware of it, the Redwall series, which to my debit I have not read, concerns the […]

Actually, before all that, what was that about insects?   After promising some manner of insectery, which in itself is a monstrous and unwieldly neologism (1), I appear to have failed to deliver. The thronging hordes in their millions of species have been conspicuously absent. Even the affectation “the insect man” is currently unsubstantiated.(2) Why, then, “theinsectman”?(6) […]

A lot of people submit books to publishers. A lot of people (albeit, I suspect, a smaller number) submit books to agents. There are a lot of us monkeys in the world, and a surprising number have typewriters. Many of the manuscripts that arrive, still sticky with the residue of bananas, are, in various definitions of the word, unprintable (1). […]

So, you write your book. In fact I wrote my first a considerable amount of time ago, while at school, and it was, frankly, not up to snuff. This is not something you tell a teenager who has just come into that idealistic and self-righteous phase that breeds brief generations of hippies, Marxists and environmentalists, whose ideas, fiercely-held […]

But I digress: specifically I digress to consider this disturbing new phenomenon that is currently rife (and it’s rare to get a chance to use the word ‘rife’) on our streets: the blog. It’s a strange condition that prompts people who are (one assumes) otherwise sane to actively perpetrate a kind of personal reality television on any unsuspecting passer-by who […]