10 Answers2025-11-07
I assume there must be someone out there running a backup of the archive and perhaps even accepting submissions on obscure contact pages. But as far as I can tell, that archive would be a ghost town and – most importantly – dead conversations (comments, reactions from the community etc.) would not be revivable even in such a scenario.
Writing is a conversation. You write and others react to it and that can even affect what you write next. Post to an inactive archive and you’re delivering a monologue to an empty room.
Go find a room where people are talking. Listen in for a while, then join in. That’s how you get to be part of a writing community these days.
5 Answers2026-04-23
HarperCollins does not accept unsolicited manuscripts. No matter how much you beg, they just won’t do it. It’s not personal, it’s just a matter of logistics. They’d be submerged beneath the tidal wave of manuscripts that would pour in were they to open up to unsolicited work. Your best shot is to get yourself an agent who can make sure your work gets in front of the right people. On the rare occasion when HarperCollins does have an open submission period, you can follow them on Twitter for the announcements – a golden ticket to consider.
4 Answers2026-04-07
I was pointed to ‘I Told You So’ by The Guardian, which described the book as ‘a messy, brilliant love letter to self-sabotage’. I read a load of reviews afterwards, and surprisingly to me, loads of them mentioned the soundtrack to the book. It’s sort of a post to the book as a whole – a sort of narrative mixtape. People either get it, or they find it pretentious. I’m in the former category – I loved how music was used as a sort of character in the book. And the ambiguous ending has been prompting a load of long posts in various forums ever since.
6 Answers2025-11-06
Typically, a journal’s average time to rejection is around 3-4 months. Acceptance or a request for revisions might occur within a month or so, but not by an enormous margin. Note that most journals do not practice simultaneous submissions, so your story will be held for that lengthy amount of time. Does your story have sufficient merit to be removed from the market for three months? For some writers, the journal’s reputation will be well worth the wait. For others, however, it may present too great of a strategic challenge, particularly when trying to quickly accumulate a list of published works.
5 Answers2025-12-05
This book has wrecked me. ‘The Last 10 Years’ is more than another terminal illness story of love, it’s a deep exploration of the unassuming regret and appreciation of life. Although I’ve seen people compare this to ‘Me Before You’ it’s a vastly different read focusing more on self-forgiveness rather than romance. Most reviews of this book either love it or find it too heavy to handle but that’s basically life too so grab a box of tissues and dive in.
8 Answers2025-07-28
ProWritingAid may also be worth a look for fiction writers. While it isn’t necessarily better than Grammarly, its style, sticky sentence, and pacing reports are more relevant to long-form fiction writing than Grammarly’s reports. As with Grammarly, it’s best to read ProWritingAid reports with both the free version and paid subscription to see which reports and suggestions are most relevant to you, and which interface is more user-friendly.
8 Answers2026-07-29
It is hard to go wrong with a perennial favorite recommended on every academic list of great novels – including ‘Middlemarch’, ‘Anna Karenina’ and ‘Moby-Dick’, all of which have been lauded by generations of literary critics for their groundbreaking structures and themes. Today, we also have a list of more recent novels that have received widespread critical acclaim. These include ‘Wolf Hall’ by Hilary Mantel, a revolutionary historical novel written in the present tense that swept the board at last year’s book awards, and ‘The Goldfinch’ by Donna Tartt, a ‘Dickensian’ novel that divided opinion among readers but won the Pulitzer Prize. However, it is the longer lists of novels that have been shortlisted for a prize that really offer the most interesting suggestions. For example, the shortlist for the International Booker Prize introduced me to a number of stunningly great translated novels including South Korean novel ‘The Vegetarian’. These are the novels that literary critics praise because they expand the literary conversation in some way.
12 Answers2025-04-30
Notice the flat, detached, clinical writing in these chapters. Because Andy narrates the collapse of his life without ever going into hysterics, we get to read about Laurie's departure from him and about Derek's death. We also read about the solitary, infrequent visits he pays to his old friends in Penzance, each recounted in the same monotone of defeat. This is the numbness that follows the emotional peak of a man's life. There's no need for melodrama. Andy does not cry as he recounts these moments from his life. He reports them to us. And because he does so without any fluctuation of emotion, we do not experience his pain. Instead we are reminded of its absence and that is even worse. It is the literary equivalent of shock.
11 Answers2026-05-29
I just finished this book and I have mixed feelings. There were so many beautiful and poignant moments, but there were also moments where I rolled my eyes at the main character’s actions. The big secret wasn’t as shocking as I had anticipated, so the main character’s long resistance to it seemed sort of melodramatic. The love interest’s devotion was sweet, but also kind of unrealistic for the amount of time that had passed. I would have liked the love interest to have some sort of flaw or have a moment of doubt. The side characters were kind of forgettable to me. Although I loved a lot of things about this book, I had issues with a lot of things as well. I think that I can see why people love this book, but I just didn’t love it enough to give it more than 3 stars. It was really good, but not great. I think that there were moments of great emotional truth in this book, and that’s what kept me interested. The last few chapters of this book were great though.
5 Answers2026-07-27
All advances are paid out against future royalties, so for a flat-fee series sale, the fee is the payment and there are no subsequent royalties. In single-title sales, the author receives the advance and then, theoretically, he or she will earn royalties on the book once it “earns out” or exceeds the amount of the advance. Few books ever earn out, though, so the advance is essentially the entire payment the author will receive for a single title. It’s a much more old-school industry payment structure than so much of the rest of the industry has undergone in the last 20 years or so.