Recent content by The Dark One

I've always been complimented on how well I write women but I've never written a female 1st person POV. The opportunity has just come up to do so and I'm already feeling very self conscious about it - after a page and a half.

Not to mention the fact that humour is a spectrum and everyone's sense of it will be different. Writing humour comes easily to me but that doesn't mean my characters are always cracking jokes. It means (mostly) that the expression of the narrative is wry/full of irony and understatement/and the...

Disagree strongly. Setting up a twist can take any form you choose and if that hapens to be in a joke, so be it.

What's fridging?

You'll break the internet with a question like that.

Or am I a bot myself? Who can tell...

I have to say (and I've suggested this to one or two regulars) that there are threads and posts over the last few months which have the whiff of AI bots about them. Do we know for sure everyone is human?

Template shows and therefore becomes predictable and ostensibly formulaic - which you do not want. Prose distinguished from others is precisely what I aspire to. I've written crime, historical and sci-fi but it's always my voice and regular readers tell me all my books feel similar despite the...

Jeez... to do that every chapter? Not only would it be a chore to write, it would become sooooo predictable.

She's a proper agent so she doesn't get paid unless the book sells. I think the difference this time is that she's taken on an unpublished work that she likes and challenged me to make the ending work better (which I've now done). My previous two agents took me on for future works after I'd...

My sister described my first (never published) book as one long poem. I thought it was a work of genius when I finished it, but these days I can't read three sentences without vomiting blood.

Reflecting on this... and looking back over what I regard as my writing development, trying to make every line zing when I first started was a big mistake. Now I try to make every chapter zing but every line is exhausting - for both writer and reader. There has to be a comfortable matrix of...

The thing about agents - and I'm so aware of this going into my third relationship - is that they (quite legitimately) spend most of their time pushing the clients that they KNOW will make them money. I have no issue with that (despite being burned in the past). Maybe this time they'll push me?

I didn't report on experience. I reported on what I suspected would happen, given human nature.

Pleased to announce that I've accepted an offer from an agent, today. It is so hard to get an agent in Oz because there are only a handful. Mine happens to be one of the more high profile specimens so I'm quite delighted about it. She was very complimentary about my new ms and spent a long time...