Your first pages – 5 more book openings critiqued by a literary agent (and me!) at @Litopia

Get the lowdown on your sub from professionals … go on, submit

Nail Your Novel

I’ve just guested again at Litopia, the online writers’ colony and community. Each week they have a YouTube show, Pop-Up Submissions, where five manuscripts are read and critiqued live on air by literary agent Peter Cox @agentpete and a guest, or sometimes two (this time we had longtime Litopia member Jon Duffy.

Here’s a glimpse of the green room before we went on air, with thoughtful shuffling of notes.

The format is simple. Five manuscripts, each with a short blurb. We hear the opening pages, then discuss how they’re working – exactly as agents would consider a manuscript that arrived in their inbox.

As always, the submissions had many strengths. Issues we discussed included atmospheric writing that doesn’t go anywhere, a character who seemed in the wrong age group, a voice that might be confusing the reader, a curious choice of second person for the narrator, obvious and unnecessary…

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It’s All In The Point of View

Or POV, as we more often say. This is a story, a personal rendition of how I learned how to understand POV. It's told from my perspective, so it's in First Person POV. No, I'm not going to talk about tenses. That's a different matter altogether, and POV is tough enough to get right without …

The Call to Magic:

It’s live, in a dark urban fantasy way …

Cage Dunn

Amazon

Description:

Awaken, spirit of Maiden, vessel of a pure soul and bearer of an empath’s heart.

Aventi sends out the call for a new Maiden. If she doesn’t get a replacement, magic will leave her. If that happens, she can’t heal, and her soul remains blemished forever.
Please, she begs, feel your truth.
But when the novitiates arrive without a guide, Aventi must choose — risk death to escort them through the same ordeal that still haunts her worst nightmares, or hide from the responsibility and close the circle?
Can she survive another journey through that hell to seek the path to redemption?

Magic calls — are you the vessel it seeks?

---

Goes live on 23 October 2020, a gift to one who loved to read on his birthday.

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Scorpio release!

Another anthology on my tbr list — I’ve loved them all

Tee Linden

Lots of talented authors in this new edition coming from Deadset Press! Pumped to have my little godstory “The Endless Chase” included 🌟🌌🌟

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Mug shots

There are days all these messages are appropriate (especially the last one) …

bluebird of bitterness

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Friday funnies

I think this may say it all about the year we’ve had –

bluebird of bitterness

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Chit, Chat without Context

The writerly term is talking heads syndrome. What does it mean? Dialogue happens, but there's nothing there, no sense of the where for setting, nor grounding of context or situation. Dialogue can be great, but if there's no world setting, no place for it to happen, the mouthpieces can be set on a piece of …

What’s a Plot?

For all of us, eventually, it's where we go after 'the end' but that's not the plot I want to talk about here. Plot in a story is about the events that lead from one to the next until 'the end' for the snippet of this [main] character's life. If the events don't lead from …

Four Times, Yes

For the last few weeks, this is what you've been getting. You get it because I've been chopped up (shoulder surgery) and then put back together (I hope) and need some time to heal and get mobility back on board. It's a slow process, especially with both shoulders now on the road. So, in the …

Proud? Yes.

The latest story is here! and in Here (the .com link to the 'zon) https://www.amazon.com/Libra-Speculative-Fiction-Inspired-Zodiac-ebook/dp/B08MQN31ND/ I already have my copy, but the sell date is 8 November which means the north of the line residents need to wait a bit longer. Not much longer, just a tiny few hours and it's all there, ready to …