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Helen at the Helm

What's new in the Office

June 9, 2018 @ 1:53 PM · Helen at the Helm

Hello Authors

Just a short note this week to keep the blog going. I've been busy again this week putting a new face on Linellen Press - new business cards, new badges, a cleaner office than it has been for a long time, two new sets of storage cubes to hold the many projects going on at the moment, and designing a new clients' meeting room which will start to happen next week.

There is also a new dog about the office - my granddaughter's Shar Pei/Staffy cross has come to stay and keep Aimee, the Sheltie, company. Now there are two dogs that appear for a pat if your hands become visible or inactive. I shall make a point of taking them for a run down the hill and back in the mornings to give me some peace in the office.

I'm working on our next new release at the moment, which is keeping me busy with layout and minor touch ups while trying to picture the best sort of cover. I'm also rebranding all my training materials as I prepare for a series of workshop deliveries up in the Goldfields, due in a couple of weeks. As well as doing the creative stuff of designing books for publication, and editing, and of course penning another novel, I love teaching/tutoring classes on creative writing. You meet so many lovely people and get to hear about their projects, and of course try to help them stay focused on it. There are so many right ways of doing our craft it's important to give encouragement rather than spread doubt in their mind that they are not good enough. Everybody has at least one good book in them - I firmly believe that - sometimes though the first draft just doesn't look at all saleable. Perseverance is the key word here. I completed twenty drafts of Bitter Comes the Storm before I felt confident it was ready, that equated to about one a year, and the reviews and comments that came in from readers after its release made me realise it was all worth the effort.

So the tip for today is ... and it is advice from one who knows ... Don't rush it! If your story has holes in it, or your grammar looks like too much hard work to fix, an Editor might just say 'no, thank you,' to an otherwise very good story.

Okay, I have to get back to preparing training materials for those workshops so I don't stand dumb-faced in front of a group in a couple of weeks. I look forward to hearing from you.

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Whilst searching for more of my beloved Sherlock Holmes stories recently, I came across a novel entitled: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, regendered by L.E. Smart. The preface explains that the author has exchanged the genders of all the characters and so the men become women and vice versa. The new heroine is Miss Sherlock Holmes... I say nothing of regendered novels ( a term I had never come across before) but am surprised that altering established stories is actually legal.

Hi Ingrid I'm not sure if this is legal, but I wouldn't think so, unless copyright has expired. Where did the novel appear, and where is it available from? I would hate to think that someone could do that to one of my novels. There is a book out that is titled "Steal This Plot", but that only says to use the plot of a well known story but set it with your own characters and locations and time period - it certainly doesn't say 'regender the characters!'

I think your tip is excellent and hugely applicable in today's world of rush, rush, rush, and anything-goes, Helen. Quality matters and quality lasts. I have recently been reading some highly entertaining Blogs advising writers how to go about things. One Science Fiction writer flatly told his readers that any writer who couldn't 'throw together a novel in five weeks straight just wasn't getting down to the job.' I should think that 'throw together' was certainly the correct term!

Hi Ingrid I think you can throw together a pretty good (raw) story in five to six weeks (I did it with my second novel BUT it took another six months to do all the research to get the facts correct), and another number of months to edit it well enough that it placed in a competition. Raw stories should just pour out of your pen and they sometimes do ... and it would be so nice to have eight hours a day to simply sit down and develop those 'big, raw lies'.