Dealing with Reviews
I write reviews. And I write some scathing reviews. But when I do that, I try and deconstruct why I don’t believe the story works. There can be a lot of reasons for this: from bad plotting to thin characterisations to tonal inconsistency (and then lots of stuff in-between). The overriding priority is identifying what the story’s trying to do. This comes from my years as an editor. When I ran editing workshops, I’d instruct the participants to talk to the author and understand what they’re attempting. Disaster looms when the author and the editor aren’t simpatico. For example, if the author’s written a book they believe is a a…
August Falling: The Inception
While I was doing the Hachette Manuscript Development Program, then-Hachette publisher Bernadette Foley asked me to think about where my book fit in the market. As research to that question, I asked some of the other participants if they’d read similar books to my own. The wonderful Kim Lock made a number of suggestions, including one popular novel. I bought a swath of books with the intent of seeing how they related to Just Another Week in Suburbia. That was the summer I house-sat my friend’s house to dog-sit their dog, Jet, so I could work on the revision of Just Another Week in Suburbia. While I was off from…