Problems with News

I'm a bit of a fan of the Daily Telegraph Website. One of life's little pleasures is sitting down at the computer and being able to have a browse at all the good stuff they put on line. Unfortunately over the past couple of weeks it's been getting decidedly flaky.

This morning the site failed to load at all. The Timesonline works fine, as do the Grauniad and the Incontinentia, but my old favourite is very much hors de combat. What on earth is going on? Do they expect me to have to go out and buy a copy?

What boys might actually want to read

Reading the Telegraph this morning I came across this piece by Ruth Dudley Edwards, a crime writer. I’ll say this; I don’t read Ruth’s stuff, but with this piece she’s hit the nail right on its broad and proverbial head.

Emasculation of the media is a creeping process which those of us (Or is it just me?) on the ‘right’ of the literary spectrum have long been concerned about. A good story is a great read, and there are far too few about.

Me a fan of ‘Chick-lit’? Not really, and only if the insomnia is a real problem.

Rejection slip

Ye cats! I just got an e-mail from Macmillan. That was the fastest rejection I've ever received. Looks like MacMillan have been swamped by manuscripts and have pulled up the drawbridge like most other people in the publishing world. This leaves me in a bit of a quandrary; do I keep on pluging away at the publishing houses or do some self publishing via Lulu.com or some other free self publisher.

I'm pretty sure it's not the writing, it's more the marketplace. Best thing to do is to have a go and see what happens. If it flops, it flops. If it takes off - well, the mainstream publishers have just lost money and my custom for good.

Submission

There's always a nervousness around the house every time a piece of work gets submitted. Today was one of the bigger nervous episodes. I despatched a synopsis and sample package off to Macmillan, and hope that they are still looking for new authors. This is the fifth re-write of the story, and I like how it has turned out, so here goes nothing. "Shifting States" the new first volume in the Cerberus trilogy works. The story works, and I personally like it and have enjoyed writing it. The characters have more life than before. You can feel them much more.

It occurs to me that there's not a hell of a lot of good science fiction out there, in England at least. Well, not stuff that piques my particular interest anyway. By good science fiction I mean 'hard' science fiction, not space opera, fantasy or horror. About the only English science fiction writer I currently like is Peter F Hamilton.

Having written that, there's not much of a market for Sci-Fi, at least not if you look through the Writers Guides. There are quite a few publishers and agents who refuse to even look at the genre and many actively discourage it. Yet there's so much published that I find very uninteresting reading anyway. No accounting for taste I suppose.

Anyway, here's hoping.