News
Here I will record anything interesting that happens in my writing life. It's not a blog - for my writing blog click here.
September 2009
I'm a beta tester for the new LitMatch site. LitMatch is excellent for tracking submissions to agents, and giving information about them, and it's free. The new site will have all sorts of extra options and facilities, and it's exciting to be in at the start of it.
1st April 2009
Catch a Falling Star wins Gold Star on Authonomy
My novel was in the top five of the charts at the end of March, so gained a star and a critique by a Harper Collins editor.
13th December 2008
Youwriteon Short Story Anthology published!
And the anthology includes my story, Comforted by Darkness. You can buy Great Short Stories by YouWriteOn.Com Writers on Amazon from £5.50.
26th September 2008
Harper Collins' editor's comments on Torbrek...and the Dragon Variation
Here is the review I won on Authonomy by getting to the top five at the end of August:
The manuscript here is a fun, solid foundation for an engaging youth adult fantasy.
It’s a well-written story following Tor, an appealing young woman who has been forced by political circumstance to pose as a man in order to join the army and use the master sword craft passed on by her grandfather. The reader meets her shortly after she achieves her aim, and as she faces her first initiation trial – to slay a dragon and rescue a princess.
Only, like Tor, the dragon, Xantilor, doesn’t turn out to be entirely predictable – and so begins a friendship that elevates Tor through the ranks to Dragon master and offers a beleaguering kingdom a chance of survival against a tyrannical neighbour.
It is a very appealing premise, and the sassy heroine and opinionated older dragon offer the reader an entertaining pairing of heroes, but at the moment it doesn’t quite live up to its promise. Primarily, the fantasy world needs more realisation; secondly, we'd feel closer to the characters if their motives were explored in greater depth.
For example, Tor’s own history is fascinating and has been carefully thought out. Skardroft’s destruction of Cramble, her grandfather’s legacy, and the weight of her disguise are all important and establish the wider political situation in the readers mind. But because the depiction of these details seems a little rushed, the picture as a whole is a little hazy. The tyrant’s ambitions could be revealed earlier in the story, as this and its connection to Skardroft’s hate of the Hundred Knights should be the framework into which everyone’s personal motives are woven. The core of the work is in place, but I wonder if there’s quite enough around it.
There are some really great characters and ideas in the story. I’d like more of them – and I’d like to be more afraid of them, too. The downfall of the dragons is certainly intriguing, and Corfe is brimming with wicked possibility. Overall, the manuscript is of good quality with an engaging voice and lightness of touch – but more work is certainly required to strike the right balance between a quickly paced story and a richly built world.
I think this is a perceptive and fair assessment ofTorbrek... but it was my first novel, and I don't want to spend any more time on it. Catch a Falling Star, my third book, is what I am working on now.
1st September 2008
As one of the first Authonomy top five, Torbrek...and the Dragon Variation's first 10,000 words will be read and critiqued bya Harper Collins' editor.
29th August 2008
Harper Collins' new website, Authonomy,is now open to the public. At the moment of writing (and this will no doubt change!) Torbrek is at number one, Trav Zander and Catch a Falling Star are at ten and eleven.
12th July 2008
Catch a Falling Star has made its first entry, after five peer reviews,in the Youwriteon charts at number one! I put it on the site on 3rd July,havingwrittenthe first pageon the 20th June 2008. I am delighted. Now for the other 88.75% of the novel...
5th May 2008
Harper Collins has asked me to be one of the private beta testers on their new writers' website, Authonomy. I am ridiculously pleased about this.
It looks as though it will be an exciting showcase for novelists hoping to attract the attention of publishers and agents. I will give more details about it soon.
6th March 2008
Rising Fire (now called Torbrek...and the Dragon Variation) did not make the Youwriteon Book of the Year top three...BUT I am thrilled that they are going to publish an anthology of all the short stories in the Best Seller Chart.
I have two in the chart, Showing Them and Comforted by Darkness. For reasons of space, the four of us with more than one story in the chart will have to choose just one to go in (unfair!)
So I will be a published author later on this year!
1st February 2008
Rising Fire has been selected for Youwriteon's longlist for BOOK OF THE YEAR. It's in the Children's and Teenage section, whichhas eight titles in it.
The final results will be announced in late February.
15th January 2008
Youwriteon PROFESSIONAL CRITIQUE of Rising Fire by Gillian Stern, editor for Bloomsbury and Curtis Brown
'Congratulations on being chosen as one of the top submissions for the month. Your synopsis and sample chapters obviously appealed to readers and this should give you a great deal of encouragement. In fact it should make you very happy!
In my job personal taste is irrelevant, but I can tell you that fantasy is not my favourite genre. However, happily for me, the extract of your novel is totally accessible and appealing and I found myself hooked and really enjoying the experience of reading it. I like the way in which you write and I like the voices and the characterisation and nothing about the writing or the story is complicated or inaccessible or difficult to take in. In fact once I got into the narrative, I was absolutely swept along – something I really did not expect.
This is good because if your novel carries on in this promising way, I feel that you would have the capacity to attract new readers to the genre – offering them a gentle and alluring way in, without anything too scary and challenging going on. This would be especially good for children – your style is easy to follow, the story is relatively straightforward (so far at least) and the characters highly pleasing to get to know.
However, I am not too sure that children are who you are aiming your writing at and therefore I feel that if you are indeed writing an older audience (‘teenagers’ are the most discerning and sophisticated of the lot), then you do need to do some further work – mainly, to inject the novel with a dose of depth and layering. Let me explain.
My main criticism is that while all these good things are good, I felt that your writing is a little simplistic – not the style, but the layering within the writing. By this I mean that as a reader, I constantly wanted to know more – more about the time and place, more about the cultural, social and political context of the time and more, much more of Tor’s internal dialogue. The fantasy market is crowded and readers are used to complex plots, ideas and imaginings and in order to be satisfied, they need something satisfying and new. And I feel that, apart from your accessible style and the relationship you set up between Tor and Xantilor and of course your plot turns, there is not all that much that is earth shatteringly new here, little that would make an editor sit up and see this above all the other proposed novels on their desk.
I don’t mean for this to be discouraging – far from it. I feel that you can write, you can tell a story and you can establish good characters and believe me, that is not something to take for granted. You should have the confidence now, to go in deeper – on practically all levels, all aspects of the novel and make the reader really interested in everything that is going on. Give them more on the world in which Tor inhabits, more on the fabric of the everyday, more on the richness of life lived in this world, more texture, more volume. We need to truly enter a different world – we need to have all our questions answered, we need to hear the noise of the people, know what it is like to be alive, become enmeshed in their internal and external lives – to experience and live it alongside them.
I am not suggesting that the novel becomes midnight-oilish – we don’t want imposed ‘research’ like clumps of information or conversations which outline the past and current situations as this would be clumsy and slow the narrative and tension down. What we do want however, is for you to skilfully insert this texture into the narrative – particularly I feel through Tor’s internal dialogue and external observation. We need to hear her internal voice much more sharply – what it is like to be a girl but have to constantly act like a boy? How does she perceive her femininity? How does she manage to hide it? How does she feel being so alone (how old is she?), with no parents or grandparents? What does she feel about the political situation in which she has to survive? What about the burden of expectation on her?
I think too, you need to inject more tension into the narrative by making other characters and their motivations more complex and layered. The ending of chapter one when Corfe reveals he has information about Tor, somehow falls flat. I guess this is because it feels a touch prescriptive, mechanistic in its placing and a little predictable. I would suggest a slower, more contextualised scene in which we come to know much more about Skardroft – something more about his internal dialogue or his motivations and ambitious scheming.
I think too, if the Dragon Manual is to play a key part in the novel and Tor’s development, we need a much richer approach to it. We need to feel we have handled it, touched it, been allowed a special access there and we need Tor’s response to this new area in her life to be much more textured.
The language of the novel feels very contemporary – something I am sure you have written in this way on purpose. I found myself wanting to pinpoint time and place (I asked myself if there were lawyers in that time – but then realised this isn’t a specific time!) and was confused by the different styles in which characters speak and act. I want to be able to hear the characters speak – which we do – but I don’t want to constantly be caught off guard by the contemporary feel of their language. It feels anachronistic – but of course I am aware that you may be playing games with us here.
In conclusion then, please take a great deal of encouragement from all of this. I think you write well and with a certain degree of confidence. However, in order for your novel to be chosen ‘out there’ from among the many scripts on editors’ desks, it needs to rise above them by truly sparkling. You have the basics here – now I feel you need to add the layering, depth and development I have outlined. I wish you all the best in working this in to your enjoyable novel.'
RISING FIRE WINS FREE LITERARY CRITIQUE ON YOUWRITEON
1st December, 2007
Rising Fire is at number one in December's Best Seller Chart, so qualifies for a free literary critique. Exciting. It will be some weeks till it arrives, and when it does I will post it on this site.
PROFESSIONAL LITERARY CRITIQUE
April 2007
This is my favourite bit of the professional critique I won for my short story, Showing Them, on Youwriteon. It is by Melissa Weatherill, who worked for literary superagent Ed Victor, then as an editor at Simon & Schuster. She is now an independent editor and reviewer for books and film, editing fiction and non-fiction, and assessing books and screenplays for film companies including the BBC.
'Writing style: This is the main area I would like to focus on. Or rather, to celebrate! I don’t have many helpful comments to impart, other than to confirm that you have a lively, engaging and natural writing style, which is the most important hurdle to overcome in this process. You create a believable, familiar world; your dialogue is snappy and immediate; your description down to earth yet convincing. In short, together with my observations about plot, pace and narrative drive, you can write fiction. It’s pacy, vivid and doesn’t dawdle or get bogged down with too much internal conjecture or speculation, which is generally the most prevalent shortcoming in new writing.'
