Recent content by jazzabel

Thank you for the article. It’s confirmed an lot of what I suspected/feared. So, no point in fearing. I’m really quite annoyed that all this is built around our stories, our hard work, our soul-bearing, years of it at times, and yet the writers seem an afterthought with no voice. It makes no...

It’s very hard to know when crossing genres, whether what you did is adequate for querying, it’s like the unknown all over again. So it helps to know it’s not that much of a big deal.

Good advice, if you are already signed up to a publishing house, or if you have thousands to pay a professional editor. Unfortunately, most unsigned authors don’t have access to either. The typical advice for an unsigned author, who wants to get trade published, is to polish the manuscript to...

Yep, I know this feeling well from when I was just starting out too. The issue is that just putting our work up somewhere and inviting critique, isn’t any sort of guarantee we’ll get useful critique. Also, the newer you are, the harder it is to take proper criticism - not critique but someone...

Thank you Tallyfire, I really appreciate you saying so. I probably won’t post in the workshop, as I am on my (hopefully) final draft, but I might post a sample chapter when I’m done, just as a taster. I am told that the story is really interesting, and people who have read it so far have gotten...

The way I would approach this is the order in which things happened, and what can be done while doing something else. Getting that right always improves the reading of it. “With a sigh, she surveyed the scene” - how long is this sigh? It’s clear what you meant, but something jars, because the...

For sure, and also, at least for me, due to all the advice of how to get your story published, which can be conflicting and dominated by business concerns of the publishers, leading to constant second guessing and feeling like whatever we have can’t be good enough. I ended up putting back so...

I write on an iPad Pro with a Magic Keyboard, which makes it feel like a laptop but without the area under left wrist getting warm, like on my previous laptop. I write in different places, but I have a favourite bay window and a seat. I’ve been using Ulysses for years, and prefer it to other...

I tend to push to finish the first draft, get it all down, and then I go on this rambling journey of countless subsequent drafts, that get abandoned and new draft started, every time I decide to change something retrospectively. It is done once I no longer feel like something is really not...

This is a tricky issue for any author with a complex situation, and these are many. From women authors who are also fleeing violence at home (so have to be anonymoius and very careful), to people writing things that don’t jive with their ordinary lives, or other projects. The readers always want...

To my mind, the most prominent feature of alcoholism, or any addiction really, is denial, and it takes many forms. Decide on how denial will be affecting their character development and goals, and it will illustrate the nature of struggle with addiction.

This issue has been on my radar for years, and it is really hard to remain positive about trad publishing, since virtue signalling in line with various ideologies became more important to them (not just publishers but all involved, editors, agents, booksellers and even other authors) than the...

I wasn’t trying to be mysterious, I thought that qualifiers in my statement (many readers, not all, and referring to formulaic-type fiction which might be selling well, but it does get a bit old after a while) would be clear, apologies if they weren’t.

I think you misread my comment. I do agree with what you said, but that wasn’t what I was referring to.

That is quite typical for forums, though.