Graham Storrs

The other day, someone in my online writers group wondered if a particular publisher was still in business. They had submitted a manuscript to them four months ago and had heard nothing. So they’d checked the website and found it hadn’t been updated since some time in 2008. Of course, old hands at the submissions [...]

I’ve been looking at 2009 to check how I’ve been doing against my writerly ambitions. It’s pretty good, overall. I got eight shorts stories published and placed in two competitions. I also won a write-a-quote competition! I also had my two first print publications (both short stories in anthologies). Although I actually made money by [...]

One of the first things that struck me when I became involved with writers’ groups, was that most aspiring writers can’t write. They may be full of wild imaginings, they may have stories in them, yearning to be told, but, as well as lacking the more esoteric skills of the craft, they can’t form a [...]

I just won a prize in a competition. The competition was run by the Seven Writing Quotes site and the prize is Advice to Writers by Jon Winokur (ed.) To win, I had to complete the simile: “Being a writer is like…” Here’s what I said.
Being a writer is like standing naked in the High [...]

I ran the complete set of posts from this blog through the Wordle program. Wordle calculates word frequencies, translates them to physical sizes, and uses this information to lay out the most frequent words in interesting ways. The image below, therefore, shows you just what I talk about most in this blog. If you haven’t [...]

If Isaac Asimov was an unknown writer and wrote the Foundation trilogy today, I doubt very much that he would have been able to get an agent or a publisher for it. I mean, just look at the writing! Endless screeds of exposition, almost everything is told, not shown, adverbs litter the text, and the [...]

If the Australian Government and the big-chain booksellers have their way, the Australian publishing industry will be all but dead in a few years’ time. There are very few Australian literary agents now, but they too will have gone. For Australian writers – especially new ones – the only chance of being published will be [...]

I can feel the last straw coming. It’s there, up above me, waiting to drop.
As you know, I’ve been looking for an agent for my latest novel. It’s not an easy thing, finding an agent to approach. Agents who are keen to represent sci-fi are like hen’s teeth these days. They were quite rare before [...]

The first I heard about punk rock was in about 1975 when some kid handed me a pamphlet on the street. It was a manifesto of sorts. It had the chord diagrams for C, F and G drawn on it and, underneath, the words, “That’s all you need to know. Now go and form a [...]

Be still my beating heart! I just got a letter today from the JABberwocky Agency in New York in reply to my query letter. It asked to see some pages!
Maybe I’m getting the hang of this query-letter thing after all.
JABberwocky is a great agency, and the agent I approached, Eddie Schneider, looks like a great [...]