MANUSCRIPT ASSESSMENT AND EDITORIAL ADVICE SINCE 1996
Blog
In 2016, TLC’s 20th anniversary year, we launched a blog as a space for thoughtful, non-promotional pieces on all things writing, editing and publishing. If you’d like to pitch a piece, please email Aki Schilz on .
We’d love to hear from you, and please feel free to comment on the blogs here.
Necessary complications and genre
December 01, 2020 | Blog
As a writer with an attention span smaller than a fruit fly’s (despite the recent invidious comparisons with Donald Trump) I need strong stuff to keep me going – cups of fair-trade Rwandan coffee, plus a big bowl of fun-size confectionary to boost the sugar levels. However, the strongest incentive to keep writing is what Stephen King calls the “gotta”: the propulsive readable quality of genre fiction which is driven by a similarly propulsive urge to write and carry a project through.
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Writing 'Wanderers'
Writing my non-fiction book did not come easily. What started it all was reading Robert Macfarlane’s book The Old Ways. I read it in mid-2014, and wrote about it shortly after in my notebook, observing that most of his ‘examples are male’ – and asked the rhetorical question ‘what relationship,
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Putting It Out There
October 01, 2020 | Blog | 2 comments
This month’s TLC Blog comes from poet David Herring, who used TLC as part of an experiment in Patreon poetry earlier this year.
“We recommend a first read-through, then putting the report aside for at least a few days, before coming back to it… [giving] you time to work through the feedback on a subconscious level.”
[Extract from TLC’s ‘Next Steps’ document,
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Being an Indie Author does not mean you should go it alone
September 01, 2020 | Blog
In 2018 I achieved my lifelong dream. After several (i.e. many) casual efforts I had sat down, taken it seriously, and written a novel. My science-fantasy epic Vile had not one but three offers from publishing houses. So why did it feel wrong? Why did I make the decision to turn down all three and go Indie?
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Home Is An Act of Creativity
August 01, 2020 | Blog
Wherever I have felt truly at home, I have felt the presence of the house of my childhood – my grandparents’ home in Colombo, Sri Lanka, shimmering through the reality of the present. The desire to capture it and to give it life, so that I might linger there once more is perhaps the single most important thing that drives me.
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My Mentor and Me
July 01, 2020 | Blog, Other News
Here, TLC Mentee and Creative Future Writing Award winner Pauline Walker conducts an interview with her TLC Mentor, Tom Bromley. And, to mix things up, we thought it would be fun to let Tom ask Pauline some questions too!
Pauline Walker: You’re a published author, editor,
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Breakfast at Bronzefield: A Book from Inside Britain's Largest Women's Prison
This month, former TLC Free Read recipient Sophie Campbell shares the story of her journey to self-publication for her powerful memoir, ‘Breakfast at Bronzefield’, which depicts her experiences inside HMP Bronzefield, the UK’s largest women’s prison.
When I made the decision to write about my experiences inside the UK’s largest women’s prison – HMP Bronzefield – the road ahead seemed pretty clear.
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The Need for Narrative
May 04, 2020 | Blog
The need for a narrative is hard-wired into we humans, the emotional significance encoded in the acts of telling and reading stories imprinted on our conscious and unconscious minds. We accord great importance to narratives, and to the ordering and understanding of a sequence of events. If you consider the multitude of ways in which we experience stories –
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A Survival Guide to Remote Working
April 07, 2020 | Blog
Freelance writer and remote work veteran Maxine Roper shares her tips for remote working and adjusting to difficult times…
Accept you’re getting used to something differentMany of us are either adjusting to remote working for the first time, or trying to fit regular jobs around writing in a very different way than usual.
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My First Year at TLC
March 01, 2020 | Blog
It’s been a whole year since I started working at The Literary Consultancy and I’m in awe at just how quickly it’s gone. Time really does fly when you’re having fun – no, my manager is not looking over my shoulder and making me type this. When I applied for the role of Editorial &
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