e-books and reading

There is a theory that simple, linear narratives are suited to e-readers. Complex literary fiction is inherently unsuited to the e-reader but far more suited to the armchair and a cup of coffee – or glass of whisky. (Select your own beverage.)

How do you use your e-reader? I still read paper books from choice, but if I don’t have one to hand, then I turn to the e-reader. My Kindle comes into its own when I’m on holiday, no matter the length of time, for the simple reason it is small, neat and takes up little space. Day to day journeys by bus are rare for me, but when I do catch the bus, I see people avidly reading as they make their way into the city. If they travel every day, perhaps twice a day going to work, then I can see that a Kindle would be a boon. The journey takes 50 minutes, and that’s a good chunk of reading time, but I don’t think I’d want to tackle something terribly complex.

Instead I’d rather have something clear, fast-paced and attention grabbing so I don’t earwig on other people’s conversations or get distracted by the cyclist wobbling along beside the bus.  The Kindle will be jiggling about a bit, so I want clear script that easy on the eye, simple page turning and a progressive story. I don’t want to have to stop and wonder about the sentence I’ve just read and I’m hardly likely to ponder the beauty of the prose among 30 other coughing, sniffing, laughing, chattering travellers.

 

I begin to see that many stories are designed with an e-reader in mind. Short sentences, fast narrative, simple language – these stories won’t ever be published in the old fashioned sense, but boy are they selling on the e-book scene.  Let’s hope that the two remain distinct forms of reading. I’d hate for all reading to merge into one simple mass.

Time runs away

Right now there are not enough hours in the day to do all I want to do!

I'm awake at 5.30 or 6 to ensure the pup goes out into the garden - at least he gets through the night now - and then back to bed for another hour or so. He wakes me up for breakfast at seven, which isn't so bad. People who go out to work get up at such hours. Then it's breakfast and a short walk around the field and back to my study for a couple of hours on the computer. So far, the routine is working well. I'm fresh, the mind is alert and I've finally cracked the first chapter of Matho down into the shape I want. Writing improved, honed, and the narrative thrust improved. Chapter 2 and 3 yet to improve likewise.

Then Tim wakes up and starts chewing my slippers. At this point I have learned that nothing will do but a walk, and a decent one at that. An hour and a half down through the woods and up almost to Hagg Bank yesterday. Back home to lunch, and by then I need a siesta. Lucky I'm not still working for a living!

Somehow the afternoon hours dwindle away with household chores, talking to Bill, another walk or playtime on the lawn and I never get back to the computer. So my PR is slowly sliding to a halt, and my e-book sales are dwindling. Somehow, I've got to get a grip and get things back on track. By ten o'clock I'm tucked up in bed and fast asleep by five minutes past the hour. Managed to watch part 2 of The Fall yesterday - frighteningly good s
toryline - and then straight into dreamsville. No sleeping problems now.

Wasting Time

What's your favourite way of wasting time?
This leads me to a list of things, such as walking on crisp autumn leaves in the green spring woods with bluebells on one side and starry white garlic flowers on the other, or lying on the sofa watching the clouds drift by my window. Soft fluffy white clouds, and big dark grey thunder clouds, all billowing into weird shapes or wisping into nothingness as the suns heats the water vapour.

Others will say playing with Facebook and Twitter, watching tv, reading a book. Heavens! When did reading a book become a time-wasting exercise? In fact, none of these things are really time-wasting. Walking outdoors activates the blood, muscles and wakes the aesthetic sense of pleasure at the beauty of nature. Watching clouds relaxes the tired mind, and then begins to wake the creative part of the brain as the clouds morph into white rabbits or sailing ships. Facebook - it's rare I use Facebook and fail to discover at least one item of interest among all the dross. (Personally I wish people wouldn't put up pictures of food because so often they look like something the dog's brought up. Yes, I know, I put two pictures of food up last summer - but the food did not look like the dog's dinner! A French chef cannot possibly - no, scratch that, I have seen French chefs produce something  that reminded me of the proverbial.....)

Twitter is the same as FB. There's always at least one snippet that catches my interest and leads me onto to whole articles I enjoy. What frustrates me about Twitter is the snippets of interesting conversation between people I don't know - so I never discover the beginning, or sometimes the end, of the conversation. I'm left full of curiosity!

As a writer, (OK, an aspiring writer) I don't think time is ever wasted. Standing around watching other people can be rewarding even if you do get seriously cold feet, as I did yesterday watching more confident people harness Sparky and Bumper. To be truthful, my feet were the only warm part of me, thanks to my trusty Scarpa hiking boots and thick socks. The rest of me was freezing, but the interplay of action was interesting and will no doubt be transferred into a book somewhere down the line. That's the thing with authors - everything, absolutely everything, can be used at some point in a novel. so there's no such thing as wasting time.

A successful man

 

Wylam is a small village ten miles west of Newcastle upon Tyne. The earliest recorded reference tells that the settlement belonged to Tynemouth Priory.  It is believed that Guy de Balliol,  Lord of Bywell, gave Wylam to the Priory in 1085, and the lands were held until the dissolution of the monasteries in the 16^th century. Once an industrial workplace with collieries and an ironworks, it is now a commuter village for Newcastle and Hexham. 

A famous man was born in the cottage (see above) on the north bank of the Tyne. George Stephenson arrived in the world on 9^th June 1781.  The tiny cottage housed three other families along with the Stephensons and conditions were cramped. He wasn’t the only rail pioneer in the area. Timothy Hackworth, also born in the village, worked with Stephenson. William Hedley, born in the nearby village of Newburn, designed the engine named Puffing Billy in 1813, two years before Stephenson produced his first locomotive Blucher.

At 14 George worked on a farm, and by 17 became the engineman at Water Row pit in Newburn.  Still illiterate, he paid to study reading, writing and arithmetic at night, and in 1801 became brakesman who controlled the winding gear at Black Callerton Colliery.  He courted Elizabeth Hindmarsh, a farmer’s daughter in the area, but because her father thought him not good enough for her, they met in secret in her orchard. 

In 1802 he courted Anne Henderson, daughter of the  house in which he lodged in Willington Quay, but she rejected his advances, so he transferred his attention to her sister Frances and married her in 1802. They lived in one room of a cottage in Willington Quay, east of Newcastle. He made shoes and mended clocks to supplement his income. Their son Robert was born in 1803 and in 1804 they moved to West Moor, near Killingworth where he worked at the Killingworth Pit. In 1806 Frances died of tuberculosis. George left his son with a local woman and went to work in Scotland at Montrose, but returned to West Moor after a few months when his father was blinded in a mining accident. In 1811 the pumping engine at Killingworth stopped working and George offered to get it working again. His success brought him the post of enginewright for all the colliery engines at Killingworth. 

He went on to become an expert in steam-driven machinery. Now a much more successful man, he married his first love, Elizabeth Hindmarsh on 29^th March,1820.

The earliest form of railway used horses to pull carts along rails. Work with steam engines progressed throughout the 18^th century. Richard Trevithick had a working steam locomotive on rails in Wales in 1804 and it worked with mixed success. He visited Newcastle and colliery owners and engineers began experimenting with steam locomotives. In 1825 George Stephenson built the Locomotion for the Stockton and Darlington railway company. In 1829 he built the Rocket which won the Rainhill Trials which established Stephenson and his company as the pre-eminent builder of steam locomotives in the world. His rail gauge of 4 feet 81/2 inches is the world’s standard gauge.

Stephenson purchased Tapton House, a Georgian mansion, near Chesterfield and went into business partnerships in coalmines, ironworks and limestone quarries. He also bought a small farm and experimented with stock breeding. His second wife died in 1845, and he married Ellen Gregory, a farmer’s daughter from Bakewell, who had been his housekeeper, in 1848 just before he died, aged 67 from a bout of pleurisy.

A full life, by any standard! 

Don't make fun of Dan Brown

I see Michael Deacon is having some fun at the expense of author Dan Brown in the Telegraph. While I find Brown's writing excessively annoying, I still don't think it is fair or all that funny to attack someone in print in this way. I have to confess the only novel of Brown's I have actually read is The Da Vinci Code, but he managed to hit the target with so many readers that my carping little complaints don't matter at all. Would that every aspiring writer should have such success. Here's the link to the original:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/10049454/Dont-make-fun-of-renowned-Dan-Brown.html

Deacon's piece is a shining example - if a trifle overdone - of overwriting, and for that alone it's worth taking a peek. It's a pity that today's world doesn't abide by the words my mother lived by - 'If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.' Today it seems no one takes heed of that advice. It is hard to avoid malicious gossip in one form or another, whether it is in the newspapers or on tv or radio. Innuendo and speculation have taken over from news.

Mind you, saying nothing at all doesn't win friends. They tend to take silence as condemnation anyway, so you're damned if you do say something and damned if you don't.  In that case, possibly better to be honest and say what you think? At least then if they won't speak to you ever again, you know why.

I think if I got to be as famous as Dan Brown or J K Rowling I'd ignore the critics, wouldn't read their reviews. After all, their invective is nothing more than journalists taking the easy option to fill a column. It has to be easy to mock something than say why a certain book is so good it deserves all the millions of dollars it has earned. That would take a little thought, but I'd much prefer it if they tried to analyse why certain books are so successful.

You might think the flowers in the pic are pretty - and they are; but if you filled your home with them you'd regret it. Garlic grows in abundance in the woods along with the bluebells.

Newcastle Writing Conference

This time last week I was limbering up for the Newcastle Writing Conference. The programme read well and I looked forward to hearing Nicola Morgan speak. Her blog Help! I need a Publisher is choc full of information I've dipped into time and again.

Claire Malcolm chaired the conference for New Writing North and did so very well. The Great Hall in the Sutherland Building of Northumbria University was vast and I was surprised to see it completely full by ten when everything began to click into action.

Questions were not allowed until the plenary session, which did not suit everyone. Most, like me, probably forgot their question or had to rush off home at 4pm when the Plenary session was just about to kick off.
The first session included Nicola, Juliet Mushens (Literary Agent)  and Lisa Highton (Two Roads Books Publisher) I wished Nicola had been allowed more time. Juliet is a new agent and therefore deals mainly with debut authors. Lisa selects books that reflect her taste, and is looking for talent and an individual voice.

(Aside to self - If all agents select to their personal taste, isn't it time we knew what their personal taste might be? and - if thousands of fiction books are published every year in this country, how does she realistically expect to discover an "individual" voice? There simply cannot be thousands of individual voices. Or is that just me being picky? And - what exactly does she mean by individual voice?)

The second session was about Market Focus, subtitled What's Hot and What's Not, but do you know, no one actually told us what was Hot. Or Not. Barry Cunningham  (Chicken House), Mark Stanton (Jenny Brown), and Julia Churchill (A M Heath) were entertaining (even though BC kept his trilby on the entire time he was on the dais and the conference in general). On the stairs afterwards I asked him to describe J K Rowling's voice, since he was the man who "discovered" her. Straightforward, he said, not too grammatical, over use of adverbs, focussed on character. The one thing that drew him to the book was the friendship of the children.

On the whole I enjoyed the day, though the paper bag lunch could have been more imaginative, and I learnt a good deal about the process my book will go through once it has been accepted. The next conference should be on the writing process and have agents who can say what it is in writing that makes them say no - or I like it but I don't love it.

The pic? Sophie Rochester of the Literary Platform, Toby White, Lisa Gee and Chris Rickaby.

Cynical world

 I should be writing.
Yet here I am looking at my blog and wishing I could jazz it up a bit. Some people have such wonderfully illustrated blogs. I think perhaps what I am doing right now is one of those things that comes under the heading of procrastination or, in other words, I'm WASTING TIME!

Wishing will not make ANYTHING happen. As someone once said, 'If you really want to do something, you'll make time and do it, won't you?' So do I really want to do it, or do I just think I should? Or am I really looking at decorating my blog as an excuse not to write? It isn't as if everyone in the world is hanging on my every word. There's no need for me to do either if I don't want to. I mean, who would notice?

 I have a good life. I haven't been kept prisoner in a house with one man and two other women for ten years, as our news people keep telling us has happened in America. It sounds like a terrible experience, but there's a tiny part of me that wonders how in over three thousand days the man didn't make a mistake before now - forgot to lock a door or a window, left a phone lying around and one of the women seized the chance to escape. There are plenty of weapons in the average home, if your mind turns to crime, and not just knives and heavy vases. Sweeping dust from under the bed in the mill a few years ago, I hit something solid, knelt down, peered under the bed and found a heavy, workmanlike axe. Chopping down trees for firewood had been the task that season, and the axe got shoved under the bed and forgotten. Then on a different occasion, in a different country, I overheard a discussion between two young householders about keeping a sharp pruning knife in the house or in the garage. The wife wanted it out of the house as a dangerous weapon. The husband wanted it inside the house so a burglar wouldn't find it in the garage and use it to break in and injure them.

The tv news won't let go of these people claiming they were abused by celebrities forty years ago. If an assault took place, one wonders why it was kept quiet until now? Again, once the initial wave of sympathy is past, one wonders what were they doing, presumably alone, in a place where they could be abused? It is hard to envisage abuse taking place while a friend or parent stands by and watches. It is equally hard to assume the young people were forcibly dragged into offices and hotel rooms. Indeed, some were not teenagers, but twenty-somethings. What was wrong with running out of the room (or wherever) screaming? Saying No? It would obviously have been safer not going to meet celebrities in the first place. Why would someone famous be interested in an unknown from the crowd? Are there hints of the casting couch syndrome here? Each thought they were getting something out of the experience?

Call me cynical but I'm wondering when the accused will be stars from the pop world, who were notorious for enjoying the groupies who (so they say) flung themselves at lead singers, drummers and even the roadies? Once that starts, the courts will have no time for anything else. And of course, my cynical self thinks the legal people will be busy for years to come.

Plots v Genre

Sad to say, but a lot of books I read today are less than memorable. They are mostly well written but the storylines are not original. Now this isn't a criticism of the authors - at least, it is not intended as one - but more a comment on the impossibility, after four hundred odd years of printed fiction, of coming up with an original plot.
Someone once said there are only 7 original plots in the world.

• Monster: The Grendel-Beowulf type of the hero defeating the monster and that plot has been around for centuries.
• Then there's the rags to riches story, where the poor person makes good. Lots of books on that theme.
• Then there's the Quest where the hero sets out to find something he desperately wants and overcomes many difficulties but finally achieves it.
• The Voyage, easily confused with the Quest. This time the hero sets out in a magical land and returns wiser than when set out. 
• Comedy - strangely, lots of romance stories fall into this category
• Tragedy - best known example here is MacBeth. 
• Re-birth - akin to tragedy but the hero realises error before it is too late

Click and see a much more detailed explanation.

At first glance it is quite hard to separate plots from genres - but here is a link to Genre.
(When did Blogger start highlighting only one letter of a link? So easy to miss.) so I shall read both and see if I can appreciate the difference.

Picture: Tim monitoring the bees among the heather...

First day out and editing

Today was the pup's first day out  on a lead. It is 9.15 and already he has had two twenty-minute walks around the field. On the first he was very hesitant, tail down, bouncing around trying to see in all directions at once in case something came up and bit him. Trees were going to pounce on him, and the wind was zipping over the hill. Tim doesn't like wind, even in our garden. The second trip was much more adventurous. Tail  out level, head up, going forward on the lead and already he knows where home is.

I think possibly writing is much like these first trips. The first draft is always hesitant and jerky, good in parts but poorly put together. The second draft is where the jerky patches get smoothed out and the holes filled in. Then the third and fourth draft improve the basic story and the writing should become smoother and more "in voice."

I have observed that American writers (and likely their readers)  prefer short, punchy sentences and fast moving stories. I think agents and publishers in this country prefer a something smoother, more literary in style - perhaps that's what they mean when they make comments like the writing is good  but it didn't make my heart sing, it didn't blow me away....it could be that the story itself just isn't strong enough, too. There are so many imponderables to consider in writing. I may learn more at the Writing Conference in Newcastle tomorrow. People like Nicola Morgan will be there to tell us how it should be done! I for one will be all ears.

Technology, wip and wildlife

Technology was beating me today. I somehow lost the Chrome Home page and tried for thirty minutes to get it back - then hubby walks in, asks what the problem is. Listens, says Click on That and when I did, up jumps the original home page. Things like that make a person feel so foolish!

I got some actual work on writing done yesterday, and should get more done today. I'd got myself to a tricky position and had to wait until I'd figured out how I was going to deal with it. Within a couple of days I had the problem resolved. I left Oli all tied up after his bid to free Gisla, and I mean tied up in a way that will be painful. Thorkel is a nasty piece of work, but we all knew that right from the start. This afternoon I shall release Oli from his bonds and see if his spirit has been broken. Somehow, I doubt it.

Tim the pooch is growing so fast it's almost visible. Such long legs! He seems to be teething as well, and chewing everything in sight. But on Friday his purdah days are over. By then the immunisation should have taken, and he can go out in the world. The next trick will be to get him to walk nicely on a lead. But we are adjusting to each other's routines quite well. One spin-off I hadn't expected from having Tim is that Bill and I talk to each other more than we did. Partly it comes from talking about Tim, and partly it's because we are up and about in the morning by six, usually. Today we had a lie-in; he didn't ask to go out for a pee in the middle of the night, and we all slept through till seven. Getting up so early means we have more hours in the day and includes breakfast with conversation instead of languishing in bed watching the TV news as we consume our cornflakes.
One night I went out with the pup and found a hedgehog in the garden. Tim didn't even approach it, but shied away. We've also got a baby rabbit that keeps popping through the fence from other gardens. Fortunately Tim hasn't seen it yet. It's a wild rabbit, and has no doubt been shoved out of the home warren in the nearby field to find his own territory. He seems happy enough, but one day he'll be too big to get through the fence.

Cliffhangers

Have you ever tried to explain to someone what a cliffhanger is? I suspect they became popular when Dickens, Trollope and co were writing weekly instalments and there had to be something exciting and dangerous so that people would remember and buy the newspaper or magazine the following week. Classical scholars would cite Scheherazade, who managed to save her life night after night by telling the Shah of Persia stories and always ending on a cliffhanger. Try that for a thousand and one nights and see how you fare.

You could argue that cliffhangers exploit the reader. The author chooses to tie the heroine to the railway tracks and  leaves her there with the distant hoot of a train in the distance, so of course the reader gets agitated. If only someone would find and free the woman then we'd all relax - and forget to buy the magazine next week. As it is we spend the entire week in a frenzy of will she die - or will she be saved?

Too many cliffhangers in one story do exploit the reader - or they annoy and irritate at the very least. But a good, gripping cliffhanger is worth it's weight in gold, and it doesn't have to be in a thriller, though the one I'm reading at the moment happens to be one of Dick Francis's classics - Come to Grief. At the end of Chapter Twelve, the hero is tied to a chair, and has watched his  prosthetic arm destroyed by a one-time friend - and you just know that there is worse to come for Sid Halley. 

So the essence of a good cliffhanger is the build up, I think. First of all, there has to be empathy for the victim, otherwise the reader doesn't care enough to worry. Then there must be a slow tightening of the screw, tension has to rise somehow, and then - only then, can the author bring the cliffhanger to its proper threat. And escape must seem impossible. 

Medieval Sickness

I've recently bought an excellent book - The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer, who also writes historical novels as James Forrester.

 I was struck by many things as I read it, but one of them was an eye opening sequence on sickness.
The possibilities of injury were common. You could be struck by a blade, an arrow, a staff or even a cannon ball. When such injuries in themselves would not have proved fatal, the medicine of the day and lack of hygiene did the necessary.

How disease spread was quite unknown, and how the body functioned was guesswork. No one knew about circulation of the blood, so instead of feeling the pulse for signs of life, a bowl of water was placed upon the victim's chest to see if you were still breathing.

The most common cause of illness, according to the medieval mind, was divine justice. Disease was  regarded as a tempering fire sent to test an individual's faith in God's mercy. Even if a cure was effected, it came courtesy of God's grace, never the skill of the doctor.

The planets and stars were thought to have an influence on health of individuals and communities and  it was believed they controlled the function of organs such as the brain and liver. Medieval people had medical knowledge, but it was very different to our own, comprising as it did of astrology, herbology, religion, philosophy, a lot of hearsay and quantities of desperation.

I thoroughly recommend Dr Mortimer's book for your enjoyment. You'll learn a lot, I assure you.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Time-Travellers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1845950992

Looking back

I loaded a post on Historical Fiction excerpts this morning and it made me realise how much time I've been on this writing game. I began in a very tentative way back in the seventies, when a typewriter and a bottle of sno-pak were the tools of the writers trade. Progress was slow, because I was working full-time, and leading a good social life most of the time. The pile of pages grew so very slowly!

Now, a writer's life is comparatively easy, thanks to computers. It is very easy to produce a page of immaculate typing, perfectly formatted on the page/screen, run it through the spell-and-grammar checker and be assured that it as correct as it is ever going to be. Even better, the internet makes finding facts easy if you are prepared to accept the first you find without cross-checking for accuracy.

But no matter how impressive a perfectly formatted and typed page seems, it is the content that is so vitally important. "Rubbish writing" can look equally as good as the most literary writing! Like most other skills, writing a story has to be learned skill. I doubt there's one writer in a thousand successful writers who made it with their first attempt. I know I look back on my earliest attempts and itch to get the red pen out and delete the repetitions, remove the unnecessary sentences. Maybe one day I will, if only for my own satisfaction. But looking back has made me realise how far I have come, and gives me an inkling of how far I have still to go. I suppose writing is a skill that just goes on growing until brain fade occurs.

Work and where to do it

My writing room is a little haven of sanctuary for me. Once I'm in there with the door shut, all is well with the world. It isn't luxurious. It is the smallest bedroom, and there is a single bed,  and a desk-cum-bookshelf arrangement made out of an old wardrobe. The most expensive thing in it, apart from the pc, is the black swivel chair. Right now I have to share this precious space with Tim, who decided on the first day that his preferred place was at my feet, under the desk. Sometimes he lies there with his chin resting on my foot.

While I'm in here, I can be anywhere I choose. Right now I alternate between the bracing west coast of Scotland in 1045AD messing about in longships with Flane and the gang, or in Stirling in 1544 with Matho as he gears himself up to capture the queen and keep out of Lennox's way. In earlier years I spent months in Viking Dublin watching Eba run from one spot of bother to another, and breathed the fresh clear air of Victorian Northumberland two steps behind Melanie Grey as she slowly comes to believe she is falling for a smuggler. Then there was the time I wrote Shadows and re-visited the sunny delights of the Cadeau valley in France. In a way, my little room is my Tardis.

Although I've never read A Room of One's Own (actually I may have done during my university years, but cannot recall much of it beyond the general premise of a room and £500 a year) I thoroughly agree with the idea. I've tried working downstairs and it just doesn't do for me. I can't get comfortable and if I'm not comfortable, the ideas don't flow. But then, I could never start work at an untidy desk when I was "at work." Only when the desk was neat and clear could I then start on something. I have a friend who works in absolute chaos (my words, not hers) while the only thing I'm itching to do is tidy her work space! Good thing we're not all made the same way. How's your work space? Be honest!

High Concept

If you are anything like me, you read the phrase High Concept and wrinkle your brow. Nicola Morgan has a talent for explaining things in terms I can understand, and I bless her time and again when she does. Here's her succinct explanation of High Concept: "Essentially, a book with an extra-strong hook. A high-concept novel is one which is easy to sell because the idea has wow factor and is easy to explain very quickly. The wow factor often comes from a sense of, “Why didn’t I think of that? That’s going to sell in shedloads. Damn it.”

High Concept often means High Stakes. The fact that you fancied a married man and bravely decided to give him up for the sake of your family is not exactly High Stakes to anyone else, though it may be to you. No one is going to die even if you do decide to kick over the traces and run off to Marrakech, though a few are going to be pretty miserable for a while. High Stakes fictionally means at least the risk death for the hero, and sometimes the end of the world. Hopefully it also means that the writing will be good.

 High Concept usually means you can easily explain the premise and that it will grab attention - for example: Life of Pi by Yann Martel. The tag line that sold it was something like a boy shipwrecked on powerless boat with dying zebra, hyena and tiger called Richard Parker. For a long time I took one look at that and thought to myself What Rot. I studiously avoided reading it for almost two years, but I never forgot it. Then it became an acclaimed film, appeared on Kindle at 20p and I couldn't resist any longer. For 20p I would take a look at this strange book. Within pages, I was hooked.

Another bestseller was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. This one I am still avoiding, and don't think I will ever read. But the tag line that sells it certainly has a stand-out quality. "An autistic savant with a fear of yellow finds a dead dog and sets out to solve the killing." Other titles might include any of the Harry Potter books, or The Hunger Games.

The trouble with agents and publishers seeking High Concept manuscripts is that, in aiming to please, there is a risk every book published will become a ride of thrilling anxiety and overdone conflict. Introspection becomes lost, and description is thrown overboard as exciting incident follows incident. Some books turn out to be quite tiring to read. There was a famous book about following clues in the Louvre that had me aching for the last chapter long before it arrived.

You can find out lots more entertaining ans useful things at Nicola's blog:
http://helpineedapublisher.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=High+concept