When this page site first made it onto the net you clicked on the monkey and reach this rather odd page of Wilf Jones waffling on. Now you only get here by clicking the menu button. Slightly dull but it works.

My intention was to offer the visitor an oft-renewed blog of general interest to readers and writers of fantasy or poetry. And it has sort of come to pass. But before we get on to all that, I want to explain who I am and what I’m up to with this site.
So here goes:                                                                                                                                                    OR GO TO BLOG

 

I’m an unpublished writer. A painful thing to be. You spend your life inventing characters and scenes, plots and places, you work on your style and your pacing, you define where you are prepared to go for the benefit of the
reader and the places you will stand and fight for what you believe is right.  And then you put it all together and
send it to a literary agency, following as many of their rules as you can, hoping they’ll be hooked enough by the
first paragraph to read the second, and knowing all the while your chances of them asking to see more of your
novel are rather worse than a thousand to one.

Maybe your story isn’t interesting enough, or it’s too complicated, or too long, or too short, or seems to have an agenda, or doesn’t know where it’s going, or maybe it’s just plain weird.

Does nobody understand you? Can’t they see you’re a genius in the making?

Well no, they can’t. And do you know what: it’s all your fault. Agents need an outline to grab their imagination,
they need faultless prose, a dynamic plot to draw them through; they need a pitch and a proposal their customers - the publishers - can understand and will find exciting. It’s your job, and yours alone, to provide for all that. Those
pre-printed rejection slips, the “no thanks” scrawl across your intro letter, the polite “not my kind of thing” explanations, the deafening silences, are nothing less than little post-it-notes to your soul. They’re there to remind you to work harder, write better, edit fiercely and keep going.

If you don’t do that you’re just monkeying-around.

 

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OK so what am I up to with this site?

Yes, I’m putting it together because I’m a devil for finding displacement activity. Yes, it’s somewhere for me to hide from the big bad world. Yes, I have developed a pathological need to become creator of my own universe. I should have been a movie director.

There are no doubt a whole raft of psychological quirks motivating my actions. Maybe when I finally lose it some
guy in a white coat will be there to delineate them for my distressed family. He won’t be telling them anything they don’t already know.

But let’s cut to the chase. Creativity and art and intelligence and a passion for storytelling means very little in this world if you don’t get your stuff out there. Self promotion, publicity and commerce rule. The cold hard reality is
that a writer needs readers. This site is my attempt to find some. The plan is simple - or possibly naive: if visitors
like what they see here then maybe they’ll want to see more.

Hell, I want to people to read my novels; I want to get them published.  And there’s a very good reason for that.
No, it’s not because I’m seeking great fame. No, it isn’t that I want to make a fortune.  And no, it’s nothing at all
to do with blatant attention-seeking.  Honest Injun!

It’s just that - and here the argument becomes somewhat cyclical - if I can get the books published, and if they produce a moderate income, then maybe I’ll be able to... write more books, draw more maps, build more
web sites.

You see I really love the... er, well, the monkeying-around with all this stuff.

It’s what I do. It’s who I am. Gods’ save us.

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And on that bombshell...                                                                                                                               OR GO TO BLOG

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     21/02/2012 wkj fantasy

 NEW
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