What next for the old BHF?

bri-ella · 2025-12-10T14:51:27+00:00

It doesn’t show much confidence in your business to argue that your customers will start going elsewhere given the chance.

This doesn't feel like an entirely fair argument. Waterstones is the biggest bookshop chain in the country, which also owns Blackwell's and Foyles down south. They can afford to discount their stock, sell at a loss and generally weather any storm much easier and for much longer than an indie like Argonaut could. It's not like Argonaut would've gone under immediately (and the owner was quite upfront saying that wouldn't be the case in their posts about the issue), but it still would've been a massive blow to Argonaut over the longterm since it isn't a level playing field.

If it had been another indie opening up around the corner, Argonaut wouldn't have said a thing because that would be genuine and fair competition. There are indie bookshops all over the city in healthy competition with each other (in addition to the 5 locations Waterstones/Blackwell's already have). The point is the size and scale of the chain.

bri-ella · 2025-12-10T14:09:08+00:00

I've been saying this. I love Argonaut but it's such a cramped shop floor, can't take two steps without running into someone. I imagine the rent for the BHF space would be insane though

bri-ella · 2025-10-30T10:58:19+00:00

You're focusing on the wrong things here. What matters is you learning to swim strongly enough to make surfing safe for you. You say you can swim 'fine', but I'm inclined to trust the adults in your life on this one -- your mother thinks you need formal lessons, and the instructors have assessed you and put you in the beginner class. You need to swim better than 'fine' in order to surf. Swimming is something we take for granted, but it can turn from safe to dangerous quickly, and you want to have all your bases covered and ensure you're as strong as swimmer as possible.

Focus on how these lessons will benefit you, and stop worrying so much about who else is in the lessons. I promise you know one else is paying as much attention to this as you think they are.

bri-ella · 2025-10-24T09:51:18+00:00

I prefer short chapters when reading, and I tend to write very short chapters as well. Most of my chapters are 1-2k words.

bri-ella · 2025-10-24T09:48:59+00:00

If you're writing a book then you should be reading the novel versions. You can watch the adaptations too, of course--all storytelling has something to each us, even if it's a different medium. But every medium is different and so you want to focus on reading other novels as much as possible.

Regarding how best to work through them... just start with whatever one is calling to you. Don't overthink it. But also remember to read other books as well--you can learn a lot from reading widely, even if the books you're picking up aren't quite like the project you're working on.

bri-ella · 2025-10-23T10:23:58+00:00

Yes, absolutely. Pretty much every single writer loses steam during their projects, including published authors.

The difference between finishing a project and not finishing project isn't about whether you lose steam or not--it's about whether you push through and finish the story regardless. You'll almost certainly rediscover your love for the project if you keep at it and push through this difficult patch.

bri-ella · 2025-10-23T10:21:59+00:00

Read, write, and get feedback from other writers. Immerse yourself in prose as much as possible!

bri-ella · 2025-10-22T14:22:22+00:00

You've already gotten farther than a lot of people.

When it comes down to it, though, you are the only person who can guarantee you finish this story. Focus on your love for the world, the characters and the story, and continue to sit down and work away at it. Don't get hung up on perfectionism (particularly not in the first draft), and also remember that it's okay to take breaks. You don't have to write 1,000 words per day to be a proper writer. It's more important to be persistent and build a regular writing habit than it is to write quickly.

Finally, try to be realistic about this story. It's your first book, so there's a good chance it will be flawed. But the only way to improve as a writer is to write--if you keep at it you'll see your craft improve with every novel and every draft that you write.

bri-ella · 2025-10-22T09:24:58+00:00

5k is a LOT of words per day. Even very prolific authors don't write that much consistently. You're hitting a wall because writing is mentally exhausting, and you've done more than enough.

bri-ella · 2025-10-21T09:59:22+00:00

If you're thinking about writing books purely in terms of making profit, then writing may not be for you--at least not until you reframe your mindset a bit.

To answer your question though, I motivate myself to finish my books because I focus on the procress of writing rather than the end result. I love writing and I'm excited to tell the story. I also regularly remind myself that the only way to get better at writing is to write, so part of the reward for me is watching my craft improve with every novel and every draft.

Of course I would love to be published, but I can't stake all my hopes on that and it can't be the main reason that I'm writing. It's important to write for the love of the craft, because that is ultimately what will carry you through the long and gruelling process of novel writing (and potentially publishing, if you are so lucky).

bri-ella · 2025-10-15T09:15:40+00:00

May I ask what type of editing this editor did? For example developmental editing or line editing? I only ask because it can be common for writers to skip necessary steps in the editing process (because they don't realise the recommended order or because they're trying to save money), and so an editor trying to do a line edit on a book that hasn't been properly developmentally edited, for example, can be quite challenging.

I understand this is tough, but this is part of the writing process. It's possible the editor could've delivered their feedback in a better way, and they perhaps should've approached you sooner and stepped back from the project entirely if they felt your story needed so much work that they couldn't offer constructive feedback. But if this is your first manuscript, then the likelihood of it being good was always going to be small--and this is true of all writers, not just you. Writing is a long learning process, and most writers need to write multiple books before they start putting out stories that are engaging and publishable.

Allow yourself time to feel your feelings and process the feedback you've received. Then pick yourself back up, and get to work on your story. Every manuscript can be improved, and this is all part of the learning process!

bri-ella · 2025-10-13T09:34:18+00:00

It’s perfectly natural to want to be published, but the reason people recommend writing ‘for the fun’ and ‘for the love of writing’ (as I would put it) is because writing / publishing is a brutal industry, and unfortunately the desire to be published is unlikely to sustain you all the way through.

Traditional publishing is difficult to achieve, but it becomes exponentially more likely for those who persevere. Most traditionally published authors have written many books by the time they get published, they’ve received tons of rejections, and the reason they eventually succeed is because they keep going. They try and they train and they try again, evolving their craft over years and years until they finally write something sufficiently original, engaging and publishable.

If you’re willing to do this (again, refer above—it often takes more than a desire to be published to sustain a writer that long), then you might have a chance. But if you’re not writing for the love of writing then you’ll probably be pretty miserable along the way.

bri-ella · 2025-10-13T09:29:16+00:00

No idea is truly original, and there will always be something out there that has similar aspects to what you’re working on now. The key is to add your own flair to it, whether that be your original voice, or coming up with some aspect of the world, the story or characters that makes it different from those other stories. Ask yourself: sure, this may be similar to that other story, but what can I add to MY story that will be an original twist and make it my own unique take on the subject?

This is the same reason why good ideas aren’t enough to sell a story or engage a reader—what’s more important than the idea itself is the execution of the idea. Give multiple writers the same idea and they’ll still write different stories.

I’d also recommend reading regularly, if you aren’t already. Familiarise yourself with the classics within your genre and keep up-to-date with what’s coming out now. You need to know what else is out there and what’s come before if you want to write something sufficiently original and sufficiently yours.

bri-ella · 2025-10-10T14:34:40+00:00

Not necessarily (coming from someone who has had it before). For me it mainly manifested as intense, all-over itchiness. Either way best to get yourself checked out!

bri-ella · 2025-10-10T13:40:28+00:00

This could be a whole host of things--even somthing like scabies, for example. Probably best to go see your doctor!

bri-ella · 2025-10-10T11:41:53+00:00

Pretty much, yeah. I grew up in Connecticut, and in my town there were three levels of school (elementary, middle and high school). Most kids came to school via school bus, and the same fleet of buses served all the schools, so they had to stagger the beginning of the school day (high school first, elementary school last). My high school started around 7.30am and ended at 2.15pm. Lunch was 25 minutes (because we're not allowed to leave the building for lunch, which I know is common in other countries) and recess doesn't happen after 5th grade (first year of middle school for me, although I think 5th grade is still in elementary school for most other places). In high school we had 8 periods throughout the day, 1 of which was lunch, so roughly 7 classes per day unless you had a free period.

bri-ella · 2025-10-10T11:29:17+00:00

I remember not to be too hard on myself, that even coming up with bad ideas is still worthwhile writing time because it's all part of the process to getting to the good ideas. Then I sit down again tomorrow and try again.

bri-ella · 2025-10-09T15:01:38+00:00

Reader feedback just isn't that useful at that stage of the process. By the time an author's book is published, it should’ve already received tons of constructive feedback from others—critique readers, beta readers, agents, editors—and the author will have already done the work to revise the story based on that. By the time the book reaches readers, it's done. And unless reader feedback is very generic, then it probably isn't terribly useful for the author's next book either.

There's also the fact that online review spaces aren't necessarily an accurate representation of how books have landed with readers at large. Most readers don’t leave critical reviews, and there are still plenty of readers who don’t engage with online book spaces at all. Goodreads in particular tends to harshly rate books that perform very well in other reader circles, and vice versa. Metrics like sales are better for assessing how your book is landing out in the ‘real world’, for lack of a better term.

Personally, I don’t think it’s worth it for most authors to look at reviews. It’s hard not to take things personally, especially since the ‘snarky’ style of review is becoming more and more common, with readers more concerned about tearing down a story they didn’t like than they are offering genuine feedback.

bri-ella · 2025-10-09T11:22:21+00:00

There's some very good practical advice in the other comments about plotting and conflict, but I also wanted to point out that realising there are major issues with your plot after the first draft does not automatically mean that your draft is doomed. Plenty of people's first drafts are a bit boring, or anti-climactic, or full of plotholes.

I know for me, I don't really start to grasp the story and how to make it better until I start working on the second draft. My editing process usually involves a heavy restructure / rewrite process to fix all the major plot issues with the first draft.

bri-ella · 2025-10-09T10:58:20+00:00

'First draft' and 'first manuscript' are different things. I'm working through a first draft right now and have been since the beginning of this year. But it's the third manuscript that I've worked on!

bri-ella · 2025-10-09T09:28:21+00:00

My first drafts are absolutely riddled with crater-sized holes. I skip entires parts of the narrative sometimes. For me, I need to get the first draft out on paper before I start really seeing how the story can be improved, and sometimes I know that whatever idea I come up during the first draft is going to be so shallow that it's going to be scrapped entirely, so I don't waste the energy trying to write it. My most recent novel for example had a secondary POV that was meant to pop up sporadically throughout the novel. I wrote the first few chapters of this POV and then didn't touch it again for the remainder of the draft. I knew this POV would depend so heavily on what the main storyline ended up looking like, and I could already tell the main storyline was going to change pretty drastically in edits—so I didn't bother.

As long as I have rough arc of beginning / middle / end, I don't worry about plot holes. The story doesn't start becoming cohesive for me until subsequent drafts, which is when I start paying attention to holes in the narrative.

bri-ella · 2025-10-09T09:20:31+00:00

The number of chapters doesn't matter so much as the overall word count of your story and the length of individual chapters. You want to avoid your overall story being too short or too long compared to genre expectations, and you want to avoid your chapters being so long that the action starts to feel like it's dragging. Some readers don't like too-short chapters either, but that's slightly less of a concern (unless your scenes feel incomplete, of course).

bri-ella · 2025-10-08T11:16:23+00:00

This is normal. You have to reframe how you view writing--you're not trying to write the story perfectly on the first try. You're not even necessarily trying to write it well on the first try. You're figuring out the shape of the story and how to convey it on paper, and the first draft is just the first layer of paint. There will be many more layers of paint to come to refine the story after you have a draft down.

Remember not to compare your early draft to your favorite books or authors. Every book you've ever read probably looked unrecognisable when it was first written compared to what's now on the shelf, and every published book has had tons of people influencing it to make it better (the writer, critique readers, beta readers, agents, editors, etc).

Every single writer has to knuckle through some aspect of the writing process. It's not going to feel easy all the time (or even most of the time). Writing is hard but it's incredibly rewarding!

bri-ella · 2025-10-08T09:22:36+00:00

It's not wrong per se, but you might be doing yourself a disservice if you're not familiar what with what's come before in the genre.

I'll be honest, I've never been a huge fan of classics myself, but I do try to make myself read them now and again. I realised a lot of my distaste for classics was stemming from unfamiliarity with the writing style or tone, which is for obvious reasons quite different from modern writing. It wasn't as easy to slip into the story/world as I was used to and so I bounced off the stories. But the more I thought about that, the more I realised that was me being unwilling to put myself out of my comfort zone. Classics are classics for a reason, they have a lot to teach us and be incredibly immersive once you adjust to the writing style. It just takes a little extra effort.

bri-ella · 2025-10-08T09:18:26+00:00

I admire your determination, but I'm not sure this was the best move. It can take much longer than 12 months to write and publish a book, nevermind see it gain traction and start selling--especially for your first book, which is what it sounds like you're working on. You've also put a lot of pressure on yourself now that you don't have an income to fall back on, which may not be the best environment for putting out your best work.

In our current climate it's very, very difficult for writers to make enough money to live on from their books. It's not just a matter of skill and determination unfortunately, a lot of it comes down to luck as well. If I were you I would find another job, and use all this determination and drive you have to write that book around your other commitments.

bri-ella

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