David Weller Author Blogspot

Following offers from indie publishers on both sides of the Atlantic (which I turned down) I was fortunate enough to receive another offer from Burning Willow Press.  Once I'd looked into them, and seen the excellent quality of the titles they had already published, I was more than happy to entrust my book baby into their capable hands. Sadly, Edd Sowder closed down his business a few months later and the world lost one of the best indie publishers on the planet. Still, if three publishers were prepared to invest their time and money into my work then I'm sure there will be others.

A NIGHT OUT IN WHITECHAPEL A Night Out In Whitechapel is a short story I published on Wattpad. It forms the first chapter of a much longer tale. The sun never set on the British Empire so they taught in every reputable public school throughout the lands coloured pink on the world map. Well, those plus a few inconsequential seats of learning where the more affluent plebs sent their offspring. But while many of Queen Victoria’s adoring subjects were basking in sunlight, the view outside Lady C’s window was far less inviting. The street outside, assuming it was still there, was hidden from her emerald green eyes by a thick blanket of smog. To say it was a pea souper would be somewhat of an understatement for when Mother Nature conjured up the recipe for this one she added several handfuls of potatoes, some turnips and topped the whole thing off with a sprig of parsley. It was, in fact, as dense as Lady C’s best friend Marjory Dimwitty. It had been a most tiresome day, the ...

It's true! Time really does fly when you are enjoying yourself. I can hardly believe that more than two months have passed since I last blogged. All I can say is that I'm still hard at work and will try to post more regularly in the future.

I haven't posted anything for over a month so I suppose that some of you may have been wondering where I'd got to. Or perhaps not. The simple truth is that I've been taking a break from blogging. And writing. There isn't much I can say about Truthseeker except that the literary agent who'd asked to read it appears to have closed down. Given her track record (see my previous post for details) this isn't much of a surprise.

This time last year, I was still in the process of sending out queries when I came across a reference on Wikipedia for a new literary agency in the UK. Without looking into their credentials, I sent off a query letter together with sample chapters. When I actually looked at their website in more detail, I couldn't find any reference to their names, postal address or phone number. Anyway, they didn't get back to me within the stated time frame of four weeks so I assumed that would be the end of the matter. About a month go, I received a request for the full manuscript. The email provided me with a name, and so I started looking into this person's background. In the process I discovered that she'd previously advertised herself as a literary agent under this name but given up. I also found out that she'd set up as a publisher back in 2010/11, but went out of business in 2012. Some of the authors whose work she published during this period are shown on Amazon as havin...

I'm currently in the process of editing Chapter One for what seems like the ten thousandth time. Despite my relative satisfaction with the final 75,000 words I'm still not sure that I've nailed the first 3K. Something seems to be missing and I really don't know what it is. One day, I suppose, I'll have a eureka moment and everything will fall into place.

One of the biggest problems when self editing is that eventually you see only what you want to see. In other words you become blind to all those glaringly obvious little errors on the pages of your manuscript. One way to overcome this is to have several copies to work from. However, they mustn't be merely clones of the original or this system won't work. In addition to my master copy (Times New Roman, size 12 font, double spaced, 3rd person past tense) I have a copy in book format using a CreateSpace 5x8 template. I also have a third copy, also in book format using a Createspace template, but this time it is written in first person past tense. Each version is sufficiently different from the others that issues not immediately obvious on one version become so when I switch to a copy written in a different format. There is however, a downside in that changes made to one version also need to be transferred onto the others. Last month I worked through my MS using my master cop...