Michael Jecks's Blog, page 10

Tuesday 19th

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Lovely parcel, thanks to Drew!




A day of surprises

The trouble with working from home is, you never know what interruptions you’ll get.

Today I was out early with the hounds, up over towards Belstone, and we had a pleasant wander – but I knew that I had a lot to do today. So we cut the walk and came back home.

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On the moors above Belstone

I sat at the computer and started it up. Every evening I tend to turn it off fully, because I believe (hope) that the thing will get a chance to reset itself. When you reboot a computer (not the old salesman’s method with a size 11 boot, but turn it off and on), the system should clean up any useless nonsense and become a functioning system once more. Yes. It should.

Today, I turned on the machine, and it went into a sulk. This was at 10.10. I tried to get to emails, and the multi-coloured wheel of death appeared. Then it stopped, and I could get into emails … for about three minutes. I was hunting on the web for a specific response to a question, and the spinning wheel came back for a second, then the screen froze.

Sigh. Turn it off and turn it on again. Same thing happened. So by 11.15, I had managed precisely no work, and the damn computer was dying again. Just then, the postman called with a box.

This was much more interesting. A friend in America had seen some of my reviews, and, knowing I loved stationery of all sorts, had gathered together a huge quantity of gorgeous notepads and cahiers of various types. A truly wonderful package to open – especially when I came across a trio of fountain pens, a Pineider travelling inkwell, travelling wallets and – well too much to detail here. Let’s just say, it’s given me several review videos in planning!

But then I had an email (on my phone – the iMac was still sulking). I have applied for financial assistance from the government to improve my hearing aids. And yes, they would support me to the tune of 6/7ths of my costs (because apparently I’m not supposed to be working on the seventh day, so I have to pay for that part of my hearing … logical, except self-employed people do tend to work every day. Anyway, no matter). The trouble was, when I started looking through the items they had listed for the £3,700 they were looking to provide me with.

There were three microphones. And a receiver, and a transmitter that sent the received signal to my aid. Why three mics? I don’t know. There was a docking station and cable – but they came with the mics. There was a spare thing which … well, I don’t know what it was. It wasn’t provided by the NHS Audiology department.

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Old tractor on our walk today

So I had to go to call a lovely lady called “Courtney”, who led me through what she and the audiologists thought I would need, and we came to a much more sensible £950, of which I would have to find about £130. Much more manageable for my income than the £550 that I was originally quoted!

So, not a good start to the day, but it improved dramatically, and at least now I have two hours clear to write, and can look forward to a new hearing aid device that will help me hear people in crowded environments, in meetings, and allow me to have good connection to my phone.

It could get interesting!

Back to Work

[image error]It’s been a hectic year, again. I suppose I ought to apologise for the radio silence in the last few months, but … well, there’s not enough hours in the day.

My YouTube channel has been taking off in recent months. It suffered last year (as did this blog) because my family has had the inevitable break – no, nothing unpleasant, just my daughter completing A-Levels, and then leaving home to go and study Architecture at university. In the run up to her exams, I was forced to stop making YouTube videos and writing so much on the blog. YouTube depended on her help: filming, editing, coming up with new ideas – everything. Meanwhile, the Blog suffered because I was so heavily involved in a new book. And that has continued until now.

As a result I have taught myself how to film, how to edit video, and how to plan new ideas. There was a major glitch, when I put my camera down in order to prepare to film, and heard a deeply unpleasant noise as soon as I turned my back … the sound of a very expensive camera falling from a desk and breaking as it hit the floor. That took six weeks of intensive care at Nikon, but now it’s back and working again.

[image error]I’m trying to make up for lost time by taking more photos while I’m out and about, although it isn’t easy – the camera’s quite old, and very heavy – so I think I’ll have to look for a replacement. All donations welcome!

Work is going well just now. I am deeply embedded in a new story that is a bit of a departure – more on that later – and I plan to bring back to life seven manuscripts that didn’t find a home before. They will each receive an in-depth Jecks treatment, and then get submitted to various publishers. If they fail in that endeavour, I may well put them on the internet to see how they are viewed there. It doesn’t appeal – because I hate spending hours of good writing time trying to work out marketing strategies, finding decent cover pictures, writing blurb and so on – but most publishers do no marketing or PR for their authors nowadays. It makes much more sense for me to put in that effort and get the income from sales, rather than doing the marketing etc and receiving a tiny percentage of the income. Publishing has changed so much in recent years.

So, beware! I am back!

If you haven’t already checked out my YouTube account, please look for WriterlyWitterings on YouTube – here’s a chat about a favourite author of mine: https://youtu.be/UOymxFD2VcU. This is my vlog all about writing, with reviews of pens, pencils, inks, paper, comments on writers I’ve found inspiring, and reviews of the books I have been reading recently. Hopefully you’ll find it fun! However, I’m hoping to maintain this blog at the same time. Every so often I expect to fail because of my workloads, but I’ll struggle on.

Which leads me to mention that another copyedit it coming to me this week. My latest book in the Jack Blackjack series of Tudor mysteries is to be published later this year, and The Dead Don’t Wait is almost ready to be sent to proof. I’ve got two weeks of intense editing coming up.

Oh, and before I forget – every so often I am given things to review or comment on. Last week I had a “giveaway” on Twitter and Facebook of a fountain pen and Rhodia leather-covered notebook. This week I’ll be offering a free, unused, Filco Majestouch Minila keyboard, which was given to me by The Keyboard Company. It is a small keyboard, with individually sprung keys – personally I would say that they are infinitely preferable to a keyboard with a rubber membrane, such as almost all laptops use. I have disposed of two flat Apple keyboards and replaced them with a Filco. And yes, I paid for it!

So, if you’re interested in a free keyboard, do please follow my social media – Twitter, Facebook and YouTube for information on how to get your hands on it!

Wish me luck!

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Writing Essays – Student Help 5

This is a copy of a flow chart I talk about in my latest YouTube video for students. If you’d like to see the video, please go to this link.

Feel free to print and use this if it helps.

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Breaking Paragraphs – Student Help 3

This is the transcript of my latest video. In this I am talking about splitting paragraphs into their constituent sentences. By doing this, you can see where a paragraph is going wrong, where sentence structure is poor, and more easily see how to fix things! When sentences are embedded in their paragraph, it’s difficult, often, to read what is actually there. For the full video, go and watch it here.

Best of luck and I hope you find this useful.

 

Hello, and welcome to another writerly witterings. I am Michael Jecks. I have been a professional author for some 24 years, and I used to teach students at Exeter University on write and edit their essays. 

However, this video is not only for students. It is for anyone who wants to communicate: for businesspeople, for those trying to write a letter of complaint, for those who want to apply for a job. Communication is vital. It’s a skill we all need in our daily lives. But sometimes things go wrong!

At Exeter, many problems developed because the students wanted to sound “academic”. To do that, they often tried to write enormously long sentences with as many polysyllabic words as possible. Once I was talking to a female student about an essay of hers, and pointed to a word in the middle of a paragraph. I asked her what it meant. She did not know. Sadly, it meant the opposite of what she wanted it to mean, and it made the paragraph literally incomprehensible. 

Your tutors want to understand what you are thinking. They need to know you can form a logical argument. To do that, you have only to express your thoughts. 

But don’t try to be too clever. Einstein once said that “if you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself”. An essay ideally should be explaining your thoughts to a youngster. Imagine you are explaining to a younger sibling. Write in that manner. Use short words and short sentences, because that way readers can follow you more easily.

But sometimes you get tangled up in words. You have a short draft, but over time you try to improve it. You add an extra long word to make the essay look and sound more academic. You extend sentences way beyond their reasonable extent, and try desperately to bind some form of meaning to them, but it’s like pinning the tail on the donkey. You cannot fix them in place.

Don’t panic, that is what this video is all about.

Incidentally, all the pages for this video as well as the transcript are available on my blog at WriterlyWitterings.com under the heading Student Help 3 – Paragraphs.

#1 This is a short paragraph I made up today. As you can see, it’s a very rough draft indeed. It doesn’t read well at all. There are a lot of problems with it.[image error]

#2 Here I have highlighted some of the problems with the text. There are lots of problems. Repetitions, changing from singular to plural, and misuse of apostrophes, among others. I have listed the issues on a page here available on WriterlyWitterings.com. The link is underneath this video. [image error]

#3 First, when you have a paragraph that just doesn’t work for you, break it into sentences. That just means go to every full stop in the paragraph and put two carriage returns after it. If you do that, your paragraph will look like this:[image error]

#4 Now you can analyse each sentence in sequence. Let’s take the longest sentence here, which drags on for four lines.[image error]

#5 Break this sentence down into logical sections. You’ll need to add a few words or take some out, but all you are doing is splitting the sentence into several shorter ones. [image error]

#6 Now you can put the shorter sentences back into the flow of the paragraph, replacing the long, horrible sentence with your shorter ones.[image error]

#7 Once you have put them all back in, it is time to read the sentences again and make sure about the grammar and structure.[image error] [image error]

#8 When you are happy with it, all you have to do is remove the carriage returns and you have a functioning paragraph once more. But now it is immediately readable and makes sense![image error]

And that is pretty much it. 

Remember, break the paragraph into manageable chunks, splitting it into sentences.

Assess whether the sentences are too long. Break up the ones that are just too long.

Break the bigger ones into smaller units; make them more manageable to a reader.

Make sure that you have a logical flow from one sentence to the next.

Remove the carriage returns to make one paragraph again.

Don’t forget to check all your paragraphs and analysing them as I showed in the last video. Breaking your essay down paragraph by paragraph is a very powerful tool to help make your writing easily comprehensible. 

And that is that for now. I hope this has been useful. Please don’t forget to like the video, share it with your friends and subscribe if you want more hints and tricks to make your writing really effective. And apart from that, many thanks for watching, and if you want to see the examples of the text, follow the link in the section below, which will take you to my blog.

Thanks for watching, and see you soon!

Students Help – Analysing Your Essay – Form and Transcript.

This is the transcript of the Youtube video which I put up here today. It is primarily aimed at students, but be aware that the same approach works for any writing. Whether you are an aspiring author, a journalist or a business manager trying to write a report, the same disciplines apply.

At the bottom of the page is the diagram which I used in the video. It should also be here as a pdf: Students Help 2 – do please let me know if it doesn’t work for your machine. I hope this transcript and the associated video will help you with your essays. If they do, please like it, subscribe, and share it with your friends.

 

HELLO! And Welcome to another Writerly Witterings.

I am Michael Jecks, and this is the second in a series of videos for students at university.

Today I am talking about planning and writing your essays.

I spoke a little in the first video about how to start writing an essay. I suggested that you should first consider the question and decide what you think the conclusion should be. Write that conclusion in outline, and then go to the library and find the sources that will support your initial view. It may be that you find there is little evidence for the conclusion you thought up, but that is fine. Now you have evidence that is pointing to a fresh conclusion.

Now, I am an author. I’ve written some 45 novels and collaborated on another ten. But I was trained as a mathematician, so I like analysing writing with numbers because it makes sense.

So you begin to write. You have an essay of 1,500 words. Ten percent will go to the Introduction, another ten percent will go into the Summary. Ten percent is 150 words, so that leaves you with 1,200 words for the body of the essay. You need to break down the logic of your argument. Here I’ve taken an example of 8 main paragraphs to lead to a conclusion because there were 8 main points I needed to make. That means I have 1,200 divided by 8 words per paragraph: 150 words. 

It is important that your essay should flow. It is like an algebraic proof. You begin with an accepted start point, which leads to a statement. You then use references, quotations, or other forms of validation to develop your theme. This development leads to another step, and so on, with link after link moving your thoughts logically onwards to the conclusion.

It is the logic that is important. Your tutor wants to see your thinking, wants to see how you develop an argument, and to understand how your thinking works. To do that, they need to see how you formulate your thoughts on paper.

So, when you have written your essay, you need to assess it.

It is very easy to get stuck into an essay and be pulled along with your own brilliance as you type. You can become convinced that your argument is just so beautiful, your prose so perfect, you can sometimes miss the fact that you didn’t answer the question itself.

I have produced a form to try to help you. Here it is

When you have written your essay, get a sheet of paper, and summarise, in one short sentence, what each paragraph is saying. This is the column with A, B through to H. Each stands for a different proposition or concept you’re introducing. Be ruthless and be honest with yourself here. Is that really what your paragraph is saying?

In a second column, make a note of the evidence, and in a third, note where each source came from.

The point of all this is to give you a quick and easy reference to see how your argument is developing through your essay.

The first thing you will notice is that you can see if there is a lack of balance. Ideally you want to have a balance of sources and references in each paragraph. If you suddenly have to have multiple sources in one paragraph, like paragraph 3 and paragraph 6, then it means you have an unbalanced argument. Perhaps you should consider removing some references at 3. There is no point over-emphasising a specific piece of evidence. One, maybe two references should be enough. Could Sources 3, 4, 5 or 6 be moved to support point A, B, or, better, D or E? Because E has not support whatsoever. Whoops! That has to be fixed.

There are also other areas to look at. If you look at the first column here, you will see that I have put in arrows to show how the paragraphs are developing. But there are two problems. First, it shows that C does not lead to D. In fact, D is a better link to C, reversing those two paragraphs. At points like this, be grateful for copy and paste!

There will be some little writing to adjust the position of these two paragraphs.

The second point is that E does not lead to F. There is a complete break in the logical flow. However, E+ does provide a working solution. So perhaps you should ditch E in favour of E+, if you can’t find a source and quotation to support E? 

Now this is all representational. It’s difficult to understand, perhaps. However, give it a try. You will find it will vastly improve your essays. As an example, when I was working with students at Exeter, I had one who was distraught, because she kept getting C or D for her essays, and she could not see why. I showed her this method, and the next mark she got was an A. 

Do please contact me if you have any problems. If you have some specific questions with your essays, if I have time, I’ll be delighted to look at them for you and make comments based on the work you send to me. All will be treated as absolutely confidential. I won’t tell your university!

In the meantime, I hope this was helpful. Please, if you liked it, give it a thumbs up, like it, share it and subscribe to future videos on essays and writing. And if you have your own ideas about subjects you’d like a professional author to look at, let me know in the comments section. 

 

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Review: THE WANDERER, by Michael Ridpath, published by Corvus Books

ISBN:781782398738

Michael Ridpath is one of those writers who consistently managed thoughtful, entertaining, deeply atmospheric stories. He was originally a bond trader in the City of London, but after eight years and the massively successful thriller FREE TO TRADE, he gave up that job and turned to writing full time.

I am very glad he did because he has written some of the most inventive thrillers of recent years.

His latest book takes us back to Iceland with Michael’s detective Magnus Jonson.

Magnus is Icelandic, but when he was young his father took his brother and him to go and live in Boston. While there his father was murdered, which later in life gave Magnus the incentive to join the police. On secondment some years ago he had been sent to Iceland, where he worked with the Reykjavik police. While there he formed a relationship, but that broke up due to the woman’s infidelity. Bruised, he returned to the US. But he feels alien, no matter where he lives. He doesn’t feel American, and he isn’t Icelandic either, although he is fluent in English and Icelandic. Perhaps it is this awareness of his own difference that makes him a good detective: perceptive and alert to other people’s mannerisms, their foibles and behaviour. But his humanity and empathy make him a strong and attractive character.

This book begins with a film crew making a documentary about Gudrid the Wanderer, a legendary Viking woman who is said to have discovered America. The presenter, Eyglo, has studied Gudrid for years, and after she presented another programme on the Vikings, is now in demand as a Viking expert.

Fresh evidence of Gudrid’s journeys have appeared. Archeological evidence discovered on Greenland at a dig, and the discovery of a letter in an obscure volume in the Vatican library is bringing to life a new theory about Columbus and his journey of discovery that led to Europe finding the New World. What if Columbus was told of a vast continent that the Vikings from Iceland had discovered centuries before? What if his greatest achievement, a matter of pride to Italians, was shown to be a matter of following a map given to him. It was no discovery at all.

Many who would be affected by this. Academics and historians who had based their entire working lives on the study of Columbus would not want to have their hero’s memory traduced or ridiculed, because that would reflect on them too. Many would have reasons to prevent such a story emerging. 

But the crew have other issues to deal with, rather than potentially upsetting Columbus’s supporters. The weather, a tight schedule, finances, all will affect the team. Until, that is, Eyglo discovers the body of a young Italian tourist behind a small church. But was the woman merely a tourist, or was she known the people in the documentary? 

At the same time an elderly man has been beaten and knocked senseless in a remote cottage, but when Magnus visits him to try to help find the assailant, the old man refuses to help. When Magnus meets his daughter, it is clear that the she and her father are both reluctant to trust the police – any police. What is it that has made them so distrustful?

Michael has once again created a tight crime thriller with a marvellous cast of characters: the presenter, anxious about her finances and supporting her son; the academic, aloof but a womaniser, whose wife knows about his infidelities and has demanded that he stop; the producer who knows that she must finish this film on time and within budget, because her company is teetering on the brink of financial collapse, and that may mean the end of her marriage as well; the American academic whose reputation could be ruined. All are believable, strong characters.

Highly recommended.

Tips for Submitting Manuscripts

I was asked yesterday on Quora about how to present a manuscript for an editor. This is not intended to be a fully-detailed example, but it summarises my own  experiences over the last 25 years of professional writing. Since it is pretty much the same whether you are looking at fiction and non-fiction books, I thought it could be useful to put it up here. Do please let me know if you have similar questions.

 

 

This is a short summary intended to help people who want to submit a manuscript to an agent or editor. It is aimed at those who have already written their work and who are looking to take it to the next stage with a view to publication.

First, please be aware that although people used to submit manuscripts to publishers without making use of a literary agent, it is extremely rare for such a submission to be successful nowadays.

The reasons are simple: editors receive more than ten unsolicited manuscripts every day. They do not have time to read them all. Thus editors rely more and more on professional agents, who are prepared to stake their reputations on the manuscripts they send on. They have de facto become the gatekeepers to publishing.

So, how should your manuscript be presented?

First, the MS should demonstrate your very best writing. Publishers will not accept you as an author if they see poor use of language. If you repeat the same word multiple times in a paragraph or on a page, editors will be inclined to reject your work. If several sentences start with the same word, if subsequent paragraphs begin with the same word, if there are regular misspellings, if there are grammatical issues, if sentences are left unfinished, if paragraphs are left hanging, editors will reject your work.

You must, must, only give them your very best work.

What is important is, you must bear in mind at all times, and at all stages, that the editor or agent is receiving at least ten other manuscripts on the day yours arrives. They are not looking for a grain of truth, a kernel of deep understanding, a plot that blows their socks off – generally they are actively looking for reasons to reject your work. They have too much other work to want to spend time with a manuscript that won’t make it to print.

For why, you only have to look at the work of an editor. They tend to work in a pressurised environment. Publishers are political organisations, and there is always a number of young ladies waiting to be able to step into an editor’s shoes. Jobs are not as secure as once they were. 

If an editor accepts your MS, she will have to present it to all her peers in the editors’ commissioning meeting. If she puts forward a manuscript that is riddled with typos, plot flaws, and poor grammar, she will have a deeply skeptical audience – and potentially a curtailed career.

Your job is to make her life easier by presenting her with no reasons to reject your work, and you achieve that by clearing up all the typos and making the very best you can of your work.

So, print out your work. Read it aloud. By printing, you will find you read the work differently, that you spot many more typos. By reading aloud, you will confirm the language of the story. If it is wrong, you will soon hear it as you read it. Anywhere you stumble over the words, you need to look at the language used more carefully. In addition, reading aloud means you will again spot more typos.

Next, print the whole thing double line spaced and store it this way. Editors prefer this, because it leaves them space to scribble between lines. Yes, all editors use electronic systems, and yes, they will add comments and corrections on screen. However, many if not most will still read printed matter. They will scrawl on paper, and either add their own comments to the electronic copy later, or have their assistant do so. Why? Probably because people who love books like paper. They (we) are old-fashioned. There is something more pleasant and tactile about handling paper, rather than reading from a screen. Also, reading from a screen will tend to introduce interruptions. Mail, social media, diary alerts and so on will all distract when the reader is trying to concentrate. Far easier to sit back with a sheaf of papers.

There is a valid point of view that you should email the book and leave it to the editor or agent to print their own copy. 

I personally recommend that you print the whole MS and post it. Do not email it. Why? Because there is nothing so impressive to a hard-nosed editor than the sound of 500 pages of novel that could be the next Harry Potter landing on their desk. Opening an envelope to read a proposal and covering letter is always exciting. Much more so than a bleep to say a fresh email has arrived, one of a hundred or so that will hit her computer that day. 

There is another aspect, which is for the overworked, it is always horribly easy to delete an email. Emails have an air of ephemerality about them. There is something horribly tangible, on the other hand, about a manuscript printed on paper. It feels like someone’s life’s work; it feels valuable.

If you take this approach, please ensure that the copy you post is in pristine condition. Do not send one with corrections and writing all over it. Similarly, if some pages got scrumpled, reprint them. Don’t send out something that seems to imply you aren’t hugely proud of your work. 

Remember: if you don’t show your work respect, you can’t expect an editor to.

And finally, the basic and vital aspects: make sure that the pages are all numbered; make sure that there is no binding – none whatsoever – editors like to have loose-leafs to work with; do not have your own colour-printed cover. It won’t help. Editors I have spoken to all reckon that the quality of the manuscript is in inverse proportion to the quality of the front cover. You need a front sheet that states your name, your address, and the total number of words. Nothing else.

I hope that helps!

I’ve Lost My Editor!

The last weeks have been more than usually busy.

I’m currently working on a new book which is close to being completed which will take me in a new direction – which is why (apologies to agent here) I’m late! Still, I think it’ll be done by the end of this week.

Which is good, because it means that I can crack on with the next book – a follow up to Act of Vengeance. And then I have to write the next Bloody Mary Series book before the end of February too, so I’ve some busy weeks ahead.

However, the last weeks have been particularly busy because our daughter (the child I am used to calling “my little girl”) has flown the nest and gone to university. Which is a strange thing. I appear to have blinked, and missed all the intervening years between her birth and her leaving home.

I remember quite clearly that, when I went to university, it was rather a big shock. Suddenly I had to rely on pay phones to speak to my parents. My friends were not close to hand. I had to make new friends, become much more outgoing (in theory).

Nowadays, everyone has a mobile phone, and with video calling software, it’s dead easy to talk to people. Students never need feel that they are completely cut off. Parents can keep in touch and be reassured that their little darlings are safe and well. It is a very different world.

So this week, rather than talking about books and writing, I’m just raising a glass to those, like me, who are also finding that their houses are just a little bit quieter, that their lives are just a little bit less meaningful, now that one of their family members has started their new adult lives.

And I’m also raising a glass to those who have just left home and are discovering the excitement of running their own finances, learning how to cook, and hopefully learning new academic studies.

But there are difficulties for students who are discovering the thrill (or horror) of being given their first essay questions, or being asked to produce a report. There is a lot to absorb in a new academic career. So to try to help, I’m embarking on a series of videos on my vlog at Writerly Witterings. They won’t be as professionally filmed or edited as the original videos, sadly – owing to the fact that my producer/director is at university herself – but I hope that they will help some of those who’re finding their new life confusing or difficult. You can find the first one Link here – and I hope it is some help to new students!

Good luck!

 

 

A Missed Murder

Very grateful for this review: “it’s a fascinating blend of genres. It’s an historical novel. It’s a murder mystery. It’s a spy thriller. It’s an adventure. It’s a comic romp (sort of). And on each of these levels, it works a treat.” #summerreading @severnhouse #crime #crimewriting

https://classicmystery.blog/2018/08/17/a-missed-murder-by-michael-jecks/

“it’s a fascinating blend of genres. It

“it’s a fascinating blend of genres. It’s an historical novel. It’s a murder mystery. It’s a spy thriller. It’s an adventure. It’s a comic romp (sort of). And on each of these levels, it works a treat.” #summerreading @severnhouse #crime #crimewriting

https://classicmystery.blog/2018/08/17/a-missed-murder-by-michael-jecks/