I spent an afternoon in York with Mark Morris reading through Bloodie Bones. After four hours in a pub poring over 600 pages of manuscript my neck ached, my eyeballs ached, my heart ached, but I had a much better understanding of where Bloodie Bones sat in the great scheme of things.
I would recommend the process to any writer. Having someone else read through my entire novel, someone who understands novels and the genre, was fascinating and immensely helpful. During the four hours I saw the same mistakes appear time and time again in my writing and while I may have identified them (with help) over a shorter piece of work it made a huge impression on me to see the same errors. Most of them were such small things and, now that I know to look out for them, easily spotted and resolved.
At the same time I had to do some soul searching about Bloodie Bones. Was it the novel I had expected it to be? (Well no, they never are!) Was it as good as it can be? Would it find a place in the market? I knew I had some reservations about Bloodie Bones: concerns about the structure of the narrative and whether it would work for a reader.
The short answer is that there are flaws in Bloodie Bones. Some flaws I had already suspected and others that came to me unannounced. With more work Bloodie Bones could be a better book. But could it be a published book? The horror market is in a strange place at the moment; it’s still very much below the commercial tidemark (go into Waterstones and look at the horror section… you get extra marks for actually finding it without asking for help…and then discard all those authors who have been publishing since the 1980s. Consider what you have left. There are some new authors there, I grant you, but then do the same trick over in the crime aisle. Get the picture? Now step away from the crime aisle, they don’t need your money.) The short answer is I don’t know. I have the feedback from Mark on Bloodie Bones’s strengths and weaknesses and I have some ideas on how I could improve it and resolve the issues identified. But could it be published? I know that ultimately the only way to find out is to do the amendments and then take it round publishers and agents. For now, I have Mark’s feedback and at the end of the month I’ll receive the feedback from TLC (which will mark the end of my period on the mentoring scheme with them) and at that point I’ll take a hard look at Bloodie Bones and decide where to go with it.
I left York with my head thudding (and not due to any excess of alcohol from the BFS open evening, I hasten to add!) with the dilemma about what to do with Bloodie Bones. I knew my time with Mark had taught me at least one key lesson, the importance of improving my skills at critiquing my own work and also having my work reviewed by others. With that in mind I set myself the task of finding a suitable online critiquing group. I signed up with Critters and I’ll give it a few months to see whether this takes me in the right direction.
And in the meantime. When I got home from York I started writing Chapter One of my new novel: The Lost.
