Recent content by Peter Hankins

I’d be very interested to hear your view idc

Definitely worth it, whatever my reservations

I’m reading Klara and the Sun at the moment. I love Ishiguro, but the way people respond to his main character here (a companion robot) seems so very unlikely it’s threatening my willing suspension of disbelief. Anyone else find that? Literary depictions of robots are rarely satisfactory imo -...

My latest round-up, for anyone who might be interested. April 2021 Competitions

I’ve got a story called ‘My Sister’s Boyfriends’. I was told I didn’t establish the narrator’s goals clearly and said too much about other people - almost as if the story were about his sister and her friends, apparently.

Here’s my (purely personal) look at competitions with deadlines in November... https://seen-and-done.com/

You may like to see my review of September writing competitions (short story and novel, no poetry). It’s not comprehensive because I only include competitions I might enter myself, but there might be something of interest.

I have a weekly non-fiction blog which is not about my creative writing, though I have featured some short bits of fiction. I use a WordPress installation on my own site; if I were starting again I’d probably just settle for the free WordPress.com hosted package, with a domain added. These days...

The first pass of revision is like being able to get to proper gardening after the jungle clearance of drafting. But after that staleness sets in progressively and I also find it hard to keep track of structural changes. Does this character already know about that? I’m confused by my own...

Honestly I don’t think I would ever be brave enough to nudge, however reasonable it may be.

My breath was taken away by what Trollope did between novels. He introduces Phineas Finn, gives him a parliamentary adventure, then wraps things up by giving him a nice job back home in Ireland and marrying him to his childhood sweetheart. Then when he wanted him back for another novel, he sort...

Thanks, this is an interesting challenge as I rarely think about animals as symbols. That said, I did have pigeons in the novel I’m working on. They were supposed to represent to my MC her own passivity; she thought they sat around assuming food would turn up, but if anything good arrived...

I thought it was an interesting point about what readers could cope with. Peter didn’t quite say this I think, but he implied it was possible young fantasy devotees would be fine with your story, but perhaps not agents who would be older and perhaps more used to other genres even if they had a...

Sarah Slap definitely doesn’t work...

I noticed a while ago that the combination of an Old Testament name with one suggesting emphasis seems to work. ‘Ezra Pound’, ‘Saul Bellow’. But ‘Ephraim Thump’ just doesn’t seem to have the magic.