David Gullen

The hardest thing for me at the moment is dealing with frustrations of brain fog and tiredness. It comes in waves. More specifically, it comes in a twelve-week cycle based around my Goserelin (Zoladex) injection. I’ve been having this treatment long enough now to expect the two weeks after injection to be low energy and low achievement. I don’t have to like it, but it is a side-effect, and what I do like is that this, and my other, daily, medication, are what are keeping me alive.

Diagnosed with advanced, early-onset aggressive prostate cancer in December 2020, I seriously doubt I would be here today without these miraculous, if frustrating, medicines.

And thank you, NHS, for simply existing, for giving me the fast and comprehensive diagnosis and treatment and ongoing care all for free when I needed it. Never have I been happier to be a tax-payer. The NHS is a marvel, a national treasure, it cannot be restated often or loud enough[1]. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I still don’t have to like it, but I know that like all things, this too shall pass. I’ll get my energy back and keep (most of) it as long as I don’t push it too hard. Reader, some days I do push it too hard. I don’t care, on those days I feel normal and that is a fine thing. By the end of the twelve weeks I’m mostly full of beans most days. Then along comes the next injection and switches it all off again.

My life has become more bounded in several ways, I simply can’t do some of the things I’d like to. I’d like to go LARPing (Live-Action Role-Play). My bones are weakened by these drugs, a fall, a blow, and I could fracture a vertebrae or some other major bone. Then I’m in a wheel chair, then I can’t exercise to keep strong, then it’s downhill from there on. There are ways round this, but It’s also a toss of a coin whether the effort of getting to an event, or back, will simply be too exhausting.

The problem with accepting these bounds is they slowly shrink unless you push back, and that takes energy, and energy, yadda, yadda, yadda.

That said, I’ve grown used to my simpler, smaller life. Not only do I accept it, I quite like it. We garden, I read, I write, we go for walks. At some point I hope to get back to leathercrafts. That’s parked for now, the idea of running a shop and making to order became too much. I’m doing some simple things here and there, just for myself. Asymmetric mouse-mats anybody?

The garden, writing, my friends and family, I feel lucky, and most privileged, that I can live a life like this, and spend my days with my lovely wife. She really is the best.

I didn’t have to work, so I stopped. It was absolutely the right decision and I’m fortunate that I could make it. I’ve always felt I was lucky where it really mattered, and still do.

And I work hard to keep well. Exercise is essential for health, physical and mental. It’s true when you’re well, and even more so for me now. Weights, walking, the rowing machine, all anchored around a weekly class run by the brilliant Emily and Chris at The Exercise Clinic.

I’m still quite productive as a writer, with a lot of short stories done, and some of them sold. This work is, I think, some of the best I’ve ever done. The best. I don’t know why or how this is, and I don’t really recommend it as a method, but somehow going through all this has made me a better writer. Every cloud.

I’m sorry if I’ve written about some of this before. The hardest thing for me at the moment is dealing with frustrations of brain fog and tiredness. It comes in waves.

1. Anyone who disagrees with this can kindly go poke it. Fuck off.
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So far it’s been a curate’s egg of a year. In the good news, my short story writing is going well. I’ve had some good sales, including Down and Out Under the Tannhauser Gate to ParSec magazine, which was then been selected for reprint in The Best of British SF 2021. Not only is this delightfully exciting, it’s the second year in a row this has happened. (The first time was for The Savages, published by Unsung Stories.) Just to get one story in an annual ‘Best of’ anthology was a huge lift to my confidence, a second one is kind of immense. I have no expectations of doing this a third time, but you never know.

I also have four, possibly five, stories accepted that I can’t talk about just yet. The reason for that is the same in each case – the publisher wants to give their anthology or magazine issue the best chance and use the publicity from us over-excited writers to good advantage when they are ready to announce the table of contents. What I can say is that three of the stories are UK publications, and the other two are to the same magazine in the USA. I don’t mind, it’s not as if these are secrets that can never be told. Watch this space.

On the other hand, my novels go nowhere, nobody seems interested. So it goes. This isn’t anything new. I keep trying to find an agent who likes my work, and submit to publishers that take direct submissions. Maybe my timing’s off, maybe my style isn’t what is wanted today, or maybe – and I think all writers need to ask themselves this question – they aren’t quite good enough. Of course, when I say this last out loud my wife grabs my collar in a two-fisted grip and tells me not to be so stupid.

I gave up the day job just over a year ago and have not regretted it for a single moment. It needed to be done, the time was right, the doctors told me I had, as best as they could tell, five years to live.

I think my writing has improved. I feel I’m just telling better stories in better ways. And here’s one of the great forever unknowns – would this have happened if I hadn’t had that advanced prostate cancer diagnosis. Once I’d begun to adjust to the new prospects in my life I wrote a couple of stories, in my own oblique way, about trying to process this news. I sold one of them too. Overall, I can’t help but feel there is a connection, but I can’t describe it.

That day job had to go. These days I marvel how I ever had the energy (hormone deprivation therapy does that to you). My leathercrafting has gone the same way, though I’m hoping this is temporary, but it’s turning into a long break. Running a successful little Etsy shop was feeling more and more like a burden than a pleasure. When I closed it to go on holiday for a couple of weeks I didn’t open it again, and this too felt like the right thing to do. I’d like to make a few beautiful or practical things at my own pace, and the fact I’m still thinking about this, about design and materials and finishes is, I think, a good sign I’ll come back to it.

Two months ago, my lovely daughter was diagnosed with breast cancer. She acted on instinct, it was caught early and there’s no spread. Now she’s on chemo and she’s going through a treatment program far more intense than mine, with all the nausea, stress, hair loss and more that entails. I tell you, it’s bad enough having cancer yourself, but dealing with this at the same time. Man, it ain’t easy.

She’s going to get better. A year, and her oncologist says she be through this. I am pretty certain doctors don’t say these things unless they mean them.

My days usually begin with writing. An hour, two hours, maybe a little more. It all depends on how much energy and focus I have, and if I don’t do it then it’s unlikely I will at all. I exercise, quite hard and quite often. There’s increasing clinical evidence this extends cancer survival time and I’m motivated. And I garden.

The garden is beautiful. Truly, the more you put into a garden the more you get back. Nature will reward you ten times over for everything you do. I find so much pleasure in working in a garden humming with bees, butterflies, hoverflies, and the occasional dragonfly and incredible iridescent rose-chafer beetle, birds, and more. And there is nothing like food straight form the plant onto your plate. Nature is timeless. Lost in the moment, I am more than happy, I am content.

This Saturday I’ve an MRI scan, it’s not my first, the scan is no big deal, half an hour in a very clean room inside a very hi-tech and noisy machine. It sounds like an AI’s first attempt at Industrial Metal. I’m not going to stress about the scan, but I am about the result because it’s to see how well my meds are holding the cancer at bay. Is it still spreading? Has it been pushed back? What can I expect for the rest of the year?

I’ve been looking after myself well, better than in years. Food, exercise, and sleep. I feel well, I feel in good form, I hope this translates into a good outcome from the scan. What are my chances? Toss a coin.

Today the sun shines. Life is good, my daughter is going to get better.

It’s been a curate’s egg of a year so far.

When I reached home after seeing the Denis Villeneuve directed Dune I tweeted:

Dune
It was OK
I could go on.

Reader, I’ve decided to go on.

If you’ve not yet seen the film at this point you may decide not to read further, that’s fine.

I saw the film with my wife and we talked about the film all the way home, we talked about it in the evening, and more the next day. By that measure the film is a great success, and also by the measure of spectacle. Visually the film is grand, almost magnificent. Maybe not quite as magnificent as his Bladerunner 2049 because while it provided epic, sweeping landscapes, titanic vistas, and monstrous scale it was, in the end, very much what I was expecting from a film called Dune.

That’s no big deal. The film provides what it is supposed to provide in this respect, but elsewhere, for me, did it live up to those expectations? Not really.

Every actor felt as if they were, to the limit the direction allowed, deep into their character. Much to my surprise, Jason Momoa, hardly my favourite actor, did what I didn’t expect and gave me a nuanced and empathic performance. Josh Brolin, an actor I like, once again didn’t have the space to stretch and show himself and show his qualities, Dave Bautista was suitably, and entertainingly pantomime horrid.

But what was this story really about? Two enormously powerful,  rich, and martial  families fight for ascendancy over one another to gain more power and riches while exploiting an impoverished nation, one slightly less so than the other. And then there’s the white saviour thing. Hmm.

Despite its grand sweep, these are the fundamental limits of the story, but that’s all right, because the pleasure of the story is in the telling, and a good story teller will hook you with a detail here, a word there, reel you in, let you see the traps of wealth and power, in what is essentially a feudal society, that a good person can inextricably find themselves in.

Villeneuve’s Dune doesn’t do that. The Atreides seem by turns amazed and bemused that their sworn foes would leave them next to nothing to work with and fulfil their duties to the Emperor – to harvest the spice vital to keep the vast, space-faring empire running. ‘I’s are dotted and ‘T’s are crossed, the story unfolds, and it’s engaging, with moments of real drama, and, less often, true wonder.

Despite all this every character lacks profundity and emotional depth and I found myself engaging with the supporting cast such as Momoa, Brolin, and Sharon Duncan-Brewster, who plays the ecologist Liet-Kynes, rather than the leads. They do far more with less in a film that is emotionally cold from the universally brutalist architecture to the limited emotions each character expresses.

That said, I can’t criticise the actors or the acting, this is Villeneuve’s film through and through. Timothée Chalamet is an engaging, competent chip off the old block, keen to play his part as scion of House Atreides in his enthusiastically gamine way. And Duke Leto? As with so much here you cannot but help draw comparisons  with David Lynch’s 1984 film. These two Duke Letos could have been separated at birth, from personality to beard, and Lynch got there first.

This, for me, was a major problem, because so much of this well-acted, visually engaging but ultimately unsatisfying film felt like a retread.  For all its faults, Lynch’s film had a passion, humour, and grandeur that Villeneuve’s film somehow lacks, and pushed through the equivocal basic story with more flair.

When epic SF and Fantasy works well on the screen it can be astonishing. After seeing the first of Peter Jackson’s  Lord of the Rings trilogy my feet barely touched the ground; Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers blew my mind with sheer scale. Partly it was the story, the story in both of these films is one of existential struggle: lose and all is lost. And while Jackson beautifully and brilliantly stayed close to the mood and tone of Tolkien’s books, Verhoeven did something different and made a wry, clever, cynical and observant film that was all about Heinlein’s book and yet at the same time not.

My first thoughts on leaving the cinema was that Villeneuve, for all the spectacle, entertainment, and good acting of his film had, in the end, brought very little new to the party. One of the great gifts, and sometimes great flaws, of cinema, is the freedom to reimagine the source material into something else. To stay true to it but change perspective. Shakespeare’s plays have by turns both suffered and enjoyed this for centuries. This didn’t happen here.

Another thought was would I go to the cinema and see part two? After seeing The Fellowship of The Ring is seemed somehow cruel that I now had to wait a whole year to see the next film, but it was exciting to wait too. Dune part two, meh, we’ll see. Maybe.

My wife said she’d like to see Dune told from the point of view of the Fremen, how they approach the replacement of one oppressor by another, their lives and ambitions. The story of Dune as told by the people of Dune. The more I thought about it, the more I liked it. That is a revisionist, alternative Dune I would pay to see.

Fin.

I believe there are only two rules of writing, true rules that are unbreakable in the same way ‘Ye canna break the laws of physics’. (Except with the laws of Physics  we’re still not sure whether we have the full set of laws, or even, much like the three blind men encountering different parts of the same elephant, if we’ve a clear grasp of the beast entire.) With writing it’s easier, there are fewer fundamental particles and fewer rules. My Grand Unified Theory consists of:

1. Writers Write
2. There are no other rules

The interpretation of Rule #1 is obvious. If you write, you are a writer, however you chose to do, or be.

This article is about some good ways to behave towards yourself and towards your writing that I’ve found work for me. It is a condensation of things I’ve read, concluded from experience, and discovered in conversation with other writers— many of whom have been around the block several more times than me.  One thing I discovered is that everyone has their own ways of being a writer. Here are some of mine.

1. Your writing, your rules

There’s a huge amount of advice out there. Much of it is good, and most of it is well-intended. Take what works for you and don’t worry about the rest. If, at some point in the future you feel the need to change the emphasis in how you work or what you write, do it. Don’t stick with rules that make you struggle.

Don’t get me wrong, many of these suggestions are excellent pieces of advice, and you should think long and hard about how and when you apply them to your own writing. There are some wonderful books on the art and craft of writing. Stephen King’s On Writing: A memoir of the Craft is highly rated, so is Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird.

Two other books I’ve found useful are Christopher Vogler’s Writer’s Journey, and D.V. Swain’s Techniques for the Selling Writer. These books are polar opposites in many ways. Vogler focuses on mythic structure and archetypes, Swain is pure nuts-and-bolts how to write, why you should do it that way, and importantly, why sometimes you should not. His rules are not rules but they are strong suggestions. This is one of the reasons I have found his book so helpful because I have a deep-rooted distrust of anyone telling me there is only one way of doing  anything. (Which Vogler does and is one reason his book is just another tool in my toolbox.)

2. Take what you do seriously.

The more I treated writing as a job the more writing I did. Having a place to write can help, but what is much better is to find places where you can write. I used to co-run a London-based group called Million Monkeys based on just that idea – that you can write anywhere.

I like to write in the conservatory, and in the before-times in the local bookshop cafe. Very professional, that, I like to think, and I look forwards to those days returning soon. The walk into town with my writing kit in my bag cleared my mind, set the expectation I was going to work, and also put me somewhere where there was little else for me to do. (Full disclosure: I might have bought a few books.) If you’re stuck at home, try walking around the block before you start work, that ‘walk to work’ can work surprisingly well.

3. Finish what you start

If you don’t finish you can’t fail but if you don’t finish you’ll never be published. One early piece of advice I had was, ‘You can’t edit a blank page.’

4. Don’t worry about what comes next.

The story is your story, long or short. Worrying about submissions and the likely rejection will only reduce your confidence and pleasure in writing.

This is among the best advice I’ve ever seen on writing:

“Your entitlement is to the deed alone, never to its results. Do not make the result of an action your motive.”

Bhagavad Gita, 2, 47-51, trans. Sir James Mallinson.

This one I find difficult. From time to time I need to come back to it and remind myself not to stress.

5. Celebrate Success

Decide what your own successes are, and how you celebrate them.  Finish a short story and I’ll walk around feeling satisfied for a bit; finish the first draft of a novel or actually sell that story and I might open a bottle of cheap fizz.

My self-confidence as a writer goes up and down. One thing that helps is having a shelf for everything I’ve had work in so I can see I’ve had my prior successes.

6. Get it out, keep it out

If you don’t submit work to markets you can’t be rejected. It’s another great way to avoid failure, but if you want to be published in paying markets you have to go through this process. I’ve sold stories to big and small markets, I’ve been rejected by those markets before and after those sales. I’ve sold stories on first submission, or on the tenth, or twentieth. Online resources like The Submission Grinder and Ralan are very good for finding markets and helping you keep your work on submission.

7. Calmness. Space. Timing

Too much time can be a bad thing. I’ve known writers who decided to live the dream, packed in the day job and wrote almost nothing for a year. One of the most useful productivity tools I’ve found is to divide my day up into chunks for 40 minutes or an hour. Set a timer and write until the tone sounds. Then reset the timer and do something else. Reset it again and come back to writing. I can achieve a lot in a day like this.  However, there will be times when you must—

9. Accept Downtime

Life will inevitably intrude on your plans and sometimes you just have to roll with it. Beating yourself up about not being able to write never helps. Maybe you cannot sit down for hours, but perhaps you can grab a few minutes. A friend of mine wrote a prize-winning short story on his PDA (remember them?) standing up on a crowded train during his commute.

Perhaps you don’t have the focus to do even that. At times like that all I’ve been able to do is wait and hope for better times to come around again. Hopefully they will.

8. Word counts

My daily word count spreadsheet is hugely motivating, but I had to learn how to use it. For some years I set my annual targets too high and never reached them. I realised this was de-motivating so I lowered it to something I knew I could achieve.  The result was I actually wrote more because I felt good about hitting my lower target and felt even better when I carried on and wrote more.

I’m not a great fan of things like NaNoWriMo, and ‘A Novel in 100 Days’.  I know my chances of hitting these target are very low and I can’t see the point in setting out to do something I know I won’t achieve. However, other people get a huge amount from these events.  Your writing. your rules, set your own targets. One thing that helps me is:

9. Routine, Exercise. Sleep

I quite like being a creature of habit, though after a while I’ll drift out of them and have to reset.  Keeping fit, eating well, getting enough sleep are all basic things but they are easy to forget and really help.

Drifting off to sleep thinking about the current work in progress is a nice thing.

11. Limit Planning

I’ve met more than one person who is planning a book. They’re building the world, creating the characters, defining the back story, drawing maps and street plans, exploring culture and language. The months and sometimes years go by and still they have not started writing. Planning can become prevarication and besides, no plot survives contact with the characters.

I think of plotting in the same way as the plans you make before you go on holiday to a place you’ve never been before. You may pick all the things you want to do and see in advance of arrival, but once you’re actually there you find a whole lot of other interesting things you’d rather do.

12. Join in. Meet, talk, listen

My first novel would never have been published if I hadn’t gone to my first Milford. I met someone there who introduced me to someone else at an early EdgeLit convention. We leaned on the bar and had a beer and things went from there.

There are dozens of conventions, groups, and meetups, there’s probably one near you. Dip a toe into a few, find the ones that work for you. Hang out, meet people, get to know them. It really helps.  I find a  weekend at a convention can be quite tiring, I need to pace myself because I only have so many social beans, but it can also be hugely energising and motivating too.

Everything is different in Covid lock down for me at the moment, but  I have found some great online writing communities. Including my own writing group, which transformed itself into a brilliant, supportive and energetic online group.

13. It’s a muscle.

Did I say twelve ways? Never mind. Like anything we do writing gets stronger the more we practice.  Good luck with yours.

Fin.

My latest novel, The Girl from a Thousand Fathoms, is available in print and ebook. Other recent work includes Third Instar from Eibonvale Press, and Once Upon a Parsec:The Book of Alien Fairy Tales, from Newcon Press. My short story, Warm Gun, won the BFS Short Story Competition in 2016, with other work short-listed for the James White Award and placed in the Aeon Award. I am a past judge for the Arthur C. Clarke and James White Awards, and former Chair of the Milford SF Conference.

This is an updated version of the article previously published on the Milford SF Conference blog.

Ian Whates

Not only is Ian Whates a successful author, he also runs Newcon Press, a prolific and multiple award-winning publisher of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. In fact, it’s hard to imagine the UK publishing genre landscape without Newcon.

1. What effects has Covid-19 lockdown had on Newcon Press?

From a personal perspective, lockdown has had little impact. My normal routine will see me go several days working slavishly at the computer without venturing into the outside world; this has just been an extension of that – somewhat extreme, admittedly. Regarding NewCon as a business, I was genuinely concerned at outset. Events we had invested in heavily, such as London Book Faire, were cancelled with little prospect of recouping our investment, and we’d sunk a substantial amount into commissioning and printing books for launches and conventions that were no longer happening. Thankfully, we’ve worked hard to turn that around, organising virtual book launches, discount sales, and other incentives. As a result, we’ve actually seen a healthy return during the past few months. The only lingering effect to date has been a delay in releasing some titles, which was necessary when the pandemic first hit to help ease cashflow pressures, and that’s had a knock-on effect with our publishing schedule.

2. You’ve mentioned you started Newcon ‘by accident’. How did that happen?

Ah yes… I helped organise a convention, NewCon 3, in Northampton in 2003, at a time when I had yet to discover the SF community. It was a great little con, but none of us knew what we were doing and it lost money. To recoup those losses, I hit upon the idea of publishing a one-off anthology as a fund raiser. Somebody said, “You need to think of a publisher’s name to publish it under.” Since this was never to be repeated, I simply opted for the name of the convention. The book came out and was well received, selling out and pretty much covering the debt. The rest, as they say, is history.

3. Having started, what was it that made you decide to carry on, and keep going?

Short term memory loss. When I held the finished book in my hand, all the woes, the mistakes and anxieties that had gone into producing the volume disappeared, and I thought: “I could do this again…”

What’s kept me going? A combination of stubbornness, the pleasure in bringing out books I feel genuinely proud of, the ability to work with writers whose work I’ve long admired and also the joy of discovering or helping to promote emerging authors. The privilege of working with really talented writers and artists lies at the heart of it, but also the question: if I wasn’t doing this, what the heck else could I do?

4. You write, you edit, you publish. What’s a typical week look like?

Honestly? There’s no such thing. I would love to say that I have a regular routine, that I write for a set number of hours and then edit or read submissions, and I seem to recall it started out that way, but now… Not so much. NewCon has grown far beyond anything I imagined, with over 140 titles published to date (23 of them in 2019 alone, which is a ridiculous number). In essence, each morning I get straight down to whatever job is the most urgent: if a cover needs to be designed and laid out, I’ll do that; if contracts need to be drawn up and sent to the authors for an anthology, I’ll do that. If payments for stories, cover art etc need to be made… if a novel needs to be line edited… if the text for an author’s collection needs to be laid out… if royalty statements need to be calculated, typed, and sent out… if printers need to be chased up… Whatever is most pressing, I’ll tackle first. I start work pretty much when I get up (anywhere between 6.00 and 7.30 am) and work through until 5.00 or 6.00 in the evening; weekends I tend to ease up a little and just work five or six hours a day. There have been long periods (often stretches of many months) when my own writing has had to go on hold, in order to keep NewCon commitments on schedule. That was never the plan, but it has become the reality.

5. Favourite Colour?

Purple; which, I understand, is said to be a non-colour, one that we all perceive differently. I had no idea that was a thing when I decided at a very young age that I liked purple, but it does seem fitting, given the nature of much that I write and indeed publish.

6. Please tell us about your own latest work.

In May I released Dark Angels Rising, the final volume of a space opera trilogy that began five years ago. At its time of release, the first volume Pelquin’s Comet became an Amazon UK #1 best seller, and, flatteringly, it returned to the top of sales charts with the third book’s appearance; in fact, at one point, all three volumes in the series were in the top 50 for ‘space opera’, which was completely unexpected. The series takes a couple of SF tropes and turns them on their head – most notably the idea of humanity making it to the stars with the aid of caches containing ancient alien technology – and is a combination of swash-buckling action, tight-knit character interaction and a dash of humour (with added aliens). The first book drew comparisons with Firefly, and the final book ventures into superheroes in space territory. I had a lot of fun with this series, which garnered some great reviews from the likes of the Guardian and the FT, and I’m sad to say goodbye to the characters.

Next, I’m turning my attention to a literary fantasy inspired by the artist Holbein, which has involved a great deal of research. The story has required me to create a number of different societies, basing some on historical periods and settings and dreaming up others from scratch, letting my imagination run wild in both instances. This one’s pretty much written – a standalone novel – but I need to rework various aspects following feedback from my agent.

7. Why do you want to tell the stories you do?

I have no idea. I’ve always told stories. As a young boy I loved to read, finding wonder in books that no film or TV programme could match (this was long before computers or more sophisticated media), because a book allows me the space to fill in the gaps with my own imagination, whereas in a film the director and producer have already done that for me. English was my favourite subject at school, essay writing the only homework I truly enjoyed. I always felt that I had something to say, my own accent to bring to the long tradition of story-telling, whether simply to entertain in one instance or make a point about society or humanity in another. Whether anyone cared to read my words was another matter, but I suppose I was vain enough to hope they might.

8. What’s the best advice you can give, or have been given, about writing?

Two things: don’t take rejection personally. Just because an editor or agent turns your story or novel down doesn’t mean it’s bad; it simply means this isn’t what they were looking for at that time. The second is to get feedback and genuine criticism from your contemporaries, from people who are not your friends or family. I did this via a writing group, and found the input invaluable, if not always enjoyable. You can learn a lot from critiquing the work of others, as well, from spotting a recurring fault in their writing and thinking: “Hey, I do that too.”

9. What are the best bits of writing and publishing?

Publishing: all of it. The process is akin to a tapestry, with threads interweaving and supporting each other. Pull one thread out and the whole thing can unravel. There’s satisfaction to be had in every aspect – returning edits to an author and having them agree to the suggested tweaks (and even thanking you), completing the layout of a cover and knowing that it works, delivering files to the printers… I suppose the best bit is holding the finished book in your hand. Of course, positive reviews always help as well…

Writing: finishing a story or a book and feeling satisfied, feeling that you’ve done justice to the idea that inspired the tale. I’ve heard it said that no story is ever truly finished, that an author can always go back and tinker with the wording here or the phrasing there, and I can appreciate the sentiment, but the law of diminishing returns kicks in and there comes a point where you know any further tweaking would just be cosmetic.  Reader reaction is vital and can be very gratifying, but being content with the story I submit is at least as important, and is about as good as it gets.

Thank you, Ian!

Ian’s own books are available in print and e-book formats. And please do take a look at NewCon Press, which is packed full of good reads. And if you’re quick you might be able to take advantage of a slightly secret special offer on some NewCon books that Ian’s currently running.

Fin.