On March 26th 2012, I submitted chapter one of Tiger Hugs to Limbo Quarterly in London, via an ad they placed in the Arts Hub weekly jobs bulletin, and they liked it. Success!

Constructive comments had pretty much dried up at Authonomy, so I was pleased when Kieran McGrath, an editor at Limbo came back with some specific changes he’d like. It was hands-on, and just what the Tiger needed. I’d started The Marquis / Tiger Hugs back in August 2008, and I’m sick of the sight of it. One day I hope I might be able to look at it again and like it. So it was refreshing and insightful when an editor did this to my Word file:

“I’ve changed some of the tenses and taken out “hoodie” – why label the character in this way? It just makes him seem like a flat stereotype. I was also thinking of cutting the first third and starting the piece when Bamber’s goon walks into the bar. This might work better as an extract because at the moment the other characters don’t reappear and it seems like a bit of a non-sequiter in an extract.”

Yes! Compare this to an example of the kind of general comment on the same theme I received on Authonomy: “First off, there are too many characters introduced at once. My head was spinning within three paragraphs, and I had to keep going back to figure out who people were. This problem was compounded by the fact that not much is given to differentiate the characters, and dialogue was mostly used to move things along.”

A comment like that makes an author, quite literally, cry. Some would say, lose confidence.

So throughout April, as Kieran continued to dip into Tiger Hugs, it came on in Tiger leaps.

May 4th was set to be the publication date, and now here’s the excerpt:

http://limboquarterly.com/2012/05/04/lunchtime-in-the-marquis-of-queensbury/

Result!