A colony for bluuuuaarrgggh.

The website Litopia is excellent. I joined maybe a couple of weeks back. It’s a writer’s forum at heart. It combines a radio station containing live shows dedicated to the discussion of writing, articles by members of the community and various other sources of information. It seems designed to help people grow as authors as well as providing a place for people to discuss any aspect of the profession. I really recommend it if that is your thing.

I managed to get people to talk about Ribena and vodka during one of the live broadcasts. My work here is done.

I’ve been reviewing the manuscript some more. It’s a lot easier to do on paper. I seem to be picking up a lot more mistakes, inconsistencies and grammatical errors now it’s physically in my hand. Some feedback from my test readers has started trickling in as well and so far the reaction is positive, which is a relief. I’m not really sure how to handle positive criticism. I mean, it’s great to be told that I’m doing something right, but I can’t really go ‘I agree, I am quite amazing, aren’t I!’ Neither can I come back to this blog and start writing about how fucking fantastic I am, either. I think instead I’ll just say ‘It isn’t terrible at this stage of the final editing’ and be done with it.

My brother said I overdid the commas. He’s totally right, as well. An unrelenting cull has since taken place.

I’ve just got my hands on a copy of Orcs by Stan Nicholls. It’s a book I’ve been waiting to get my hands on for a while since everyone I know who has read it says it’s pretty good. The aforementioned brother has a pretty solid collection of fantasy novels – him being all employed and stuff, ho ho ho – and so I occasionally steal them if I don’t want to download it onto Kindle for PC. Will see how it goes.

I’m not being hugely productive during my week in England. I am planning my next book though, which I intend to start when I get back to Hamar. It’s likely going to be the fairy / heavy metal / apocalypse book I mentioned in a previous post. So I’m just kicking back and enjoying my break until then, at which point it’ll be writing for four hours a day once again up. Score.

This post was a bit lacking in substance. It’s my holiday. So nyah.

Second daft. (sic)

I’m done with the second draft. Ish.

The missus read through the manuscript. It was printed out, all two hundred and forty pages of it. It looked lovely. Having the thing in my hand after nine months of staring at it on a laptop screen was great. I was like a kid at Christmas waiting for it to arrive. When it did it was laughs and smiles all round. Anyway, she read through it and gave me some excellent feedback as well as some morale-boosting affirmations that it wasn’t a big pile of poo. I’ve since mailed it off to a few other friends who agreed to critique it, and am now anxiously waiting to see what they say.

I found this very cool PDF file from Darcy Pattison giving advice on the second draft. It gave some tips which most other articles covering drafts touch on, as well as some others I hadn’t considered.

So after drafting a bit extra and touching up the first three chapters – well, making three chapters since the original manuscript isn’t chaptered, just broken into pieces – I’m looking to agencies who may be interested in representing me, providing they don’t think the story is a big pile of poo. It seems only a handful of agencies in the UK represent fantasy. There’s a list of them to be found here. Reading through it struck me that getting an agent is going to be pretty tricky. They get hundreds of submissions monthly, it seems, and not only do I have to ensure my work is saleable but also that the submission stands out in the first place. What if it turns out that a person is a great story writer but terrible at submissions? That isn’t self referential, but looking at some writing forums a common complaint seems to be ‘I’ve been submitting for years and never got a single good reply back from an agency’. Is that due to their writing or the way they submit?

Also, I need to write a synopsis. I find the idea of doing so to be difficult. It’s not so much condensing down the story into a single page – that shouldn’t be too tricky, I haven’t written the Bible – but the deep-seated need to want to keep things interesting. I would rather say ‘Then the character arrived to meet his nemesis WITH HILARIOUS CONSEQUENCES’ and then let whoever I’m describing it to read for themselves what happens. I have this idea that if you know the story in advance, and get it all in five hundred words, why would you then read a hundred thousand more?

Of course I understand it from a selling-the-bloody-thing perspective. It just makes me go ngggghhh.

I sent one submission to John Jarrold. The submission was terrible. I’m not expecting anything in response. Balls.

In less than a week I move to my home for the next year. Student shared accommodation. Get in. Also, I’ll be home to visit the family and friends in sunny Essex later this month. The sunshine here in Arendal is excellent at the moment. I caught my first Norwegian fish. It was a cod. I was happy.

Really happy.

It tasted awesome, too!