{"id":1661,"date":"2012-09-21T20:12:53","date_gmt":"2012-09-21T20:12:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/?p=1661"},"modified":"2012-09-22T10:56:00","modified_gmt":"2012-09-22T10:56:00","slug":"york-festival-of-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/?p=1661","title":{"rendered":"York Festival Of Writing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Apologies for the absence of recent updates: writing time has recently become increasingly hard to come by, although mostly in a good way, via holidays and other enjoyable events that I have hopes of getting around to writing blog posts about eventually \u00e2\u20ac\u201c I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got a nice batch of photos to upload, if nothing else.<\/p>\n

In addition to this summer activity, the MMU MA has crept up on me. The enigmatic\u00c2\u00a0Transmission Project<\/em> needs to be submitted very soon (perhaps more of this in another blog post). As far as the MA course goes, once that project has been completed then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just a case of completing The Big One\u00c2\u00a0<\/em>\u00e2\u20ac\u201c handing in a 60,000 word minimum manuscript of a novel. \u00c2\u00a0Regular followers of this blog will know that hitting that word limit isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t likely to pose me any problems in itself as I already have a completed manuscript that comfortably exceeds that length (rather too comfortably as it currently stands).<\/p>\n

Despite my best intentions, however, the novel still needs a degree honing and polishing before it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ready to submit to anyone \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a tutor for assessment for an MA or an agent or publisher. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s frustrating but that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s where I am, even though back in March, I wrote a post with great expectation that the professional feedback I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d had on my manuscript had suggested that that it was only a couple of weeks or so’s hard work away from being a respectable manuscript.<\/p>\n

The problem has been finding that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s two weeks\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 worth of extra time in this Olympic summer when I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve not only been doing the MA but finding all kinds of loosely novel-related but fascinating research in London (mainly art-related with plenty of visits to Shoreditch). I know from having taken an MSc with the Open University that took over six years that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m much more productive in the darker months \u00e2\u20ac\u201c I like getting out in the sun too much.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, with springtime optimism, I booked myself a place at the York Festival of Writing<\/a>. Amongst its literary attractions, I anticipated the event would be a perfectly\u00e2\u20ac\u201ctimed opportunity to advance my path to publication. With my long-completed manuscript under my arm and more agents attending than you could shake a Kindle at, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d be able to immediately hand my over my burnished tome or send it speeding within minutes into the lucky agent’s inbox.\u00c2\u00a0 After all the Festival was in September \u00e2\u20ac\u201c six months in the future.<\/p>\n

\"York<\/a>
York University Campus — Where the Festival of Writing Was Held<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Unfortunately, September sneaked up on me much more quickly than anticipated \u00e2\u20ac\u201c immediately after my spontaneous sabbatical over the late summer \u00e2\u20ac\u201c of London 2012, holidays and even a little bit of decent weather. As mentioned in a weary-sounding blog post in July <\/a>as well as reaching \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcthe end\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d also done a fair bit of work on a submissions package (a polishing the first three chapters, writing a synopsis and covering letter). It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve finished knocking the rest of the manuscript into similar shape \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d learned enough about agents to know that if they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re interested in a novel that they immediately want to read the manuscript in its entirety \u00e2\u20ac\u201c not several months later. (That didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t stop me hopefully printing off a few hard copies of my first three chapters to take to York, just in case.)<\/p>\n

When I booked the festival I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really think about York (it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s held at the attractive York University campus) being rather a long way away from here in the Chilterns. Having done nearly 2,000 miles of driving around Europe in late August, it was inevitable that my journey north would provide another horrendous example for my 2012 collection of summer traffic jams (after some nightmarish examples on Italian autostrade). I was held up for over an hour on the M62 — the kind of jam where the cars come to a total standstill and after a certain point their occupants emerge gingerly and start to colonise the alien carriageway, exchange a few words of exasperation with their normally faceless neighbours — and then suddenly run back from the hard shoulder or central reservation and jump back in when the traffic unexpectedly starts to move. Maybe there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a germ of an idea for a novel in that? Maybe not!<\/p>\n

\"M62<\/a>
I Should Have Been Listening to Jojo Moyes At This Point<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So I arrived late at the conference, almost at lunchtime on the Saturday, not in \u00c2\u00a0the most positive frame of mind: why have I driven 200 miles north to spend the my weekend with a bunch of people I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve never met \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and I haven’t even finished the novel? Shouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t I be spending the time more productively at home finishing the book? Or, more likely, enjoying the last throes of this meagre summer, enjoying the sunshine in a deck chair rather than sitting in windowless lecture theatres?<\/p>\n

But I left the conference on Sunday afternoon feeling remarkably upbeat and happily kick\u00e2\u20ac\u201cstarted out of my summer writing hiatus. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d not been able to pitch a completed novel but I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d come away uplifted by all the other benefits of spending the best part of a weekend in a community of writers.<\/p>\n

For anyone who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s curious about the York Festival of Writing, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s organised by the\u00c2\u00a0Writers’ Workshop<\/a>, a literary consultancy. The conference, held over a weekend, is structured around a programme of seminars, workshops and plenary ‘keynote’ sessions (similar to day\u00e2\u20ac\u201cjob related conferences I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been on). Sadly the traffic trouble meant I missed the Jojo Moyes keynote on Saturday morning).<\/p>\n

But, as with most worthwhile conferences, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the intangible elements rather than the programme itself that were most inspiring. Writing is (usually) a solitary experience but a weekend that gathered hundreds of writers together in the same place \u00e2\u20ac\u201c most with very similar shared ambitions, interests, questions and anxieties \u00e2\u20ac\u201c seemed to prove an affirmatory experience for those involved.<\/p>\n

Committing the time (and money) to attending a writing conference means all participants had made the psychological step of regarding themselves as ‘a writer’. You chat to and exchange experiences with others working towards the same goal and come away feeling validated \u00e2\u20ac\u201c that your aspiration to become a published writer isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t futile self-delusion because so many other people are working towards the same \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and agents and editors have made efforts to come and meet us all.<\/p>\n

There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s camaraderie in numbers but the number of people there (at least a couple of hundred I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d guess) makes a sobering point. After an agent discussion, one panellist, who is a full-time reader of unsolicited manuscripts for a leading agency, said informally that he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d estimate that perhaps only one or two of the delegates might end up being successfully traditionally published novelists.<\/p>\n

Despite (or maybe because of) these odds, the event wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t in the slightest cut\u00e2\u20ac\u201cthroat and competitive \u00e2\u20ac\u201c everyone was unfailingly open and keen to ask others about their writing. I suspect that most people felt, like me, a little daunted about walking into the dining room for a formal dinner without really knowing anyone else there, having not met anyone else in the room before that weekend but it was a very friendly and sociable event. Happily, there wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t the chest\u00e2\u20ac\u201cbeating atmosphere of a sales conference \u00e2\u20ac\u201c with backs being knifed in pursuit of the deal (well, not on my table at least!). Perhaps writers, almost by definition, tend to congregate at the quieter end of the introvert\u00e2\u20ac\u201cextrovert spectrum, preferring to commit our ideas to paper or on screen?<\/p>\n

(A tutor on a short course I took at City University had a theory that all writers were \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcdamaged\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 in some way \u00e2\u20ac\u201c creating a compulsion to write \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a view which I think has more than a grain of truth but is no reflection on the nice people I met at York!)<\/p>\n

The welcoming atmosphere may have been connected with the number of northerners among the delegates (I can happily suggest this as an exiled northerner myself). My \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcday job\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 is currently bang in the centre of London and one of the consolations of toiling away there is a feeling that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not too far away from the literary London of agents and publishers (being able to see the London Eye, Gherkin, BT Tower and Buckingham Palace from the window,\u00c2\u00a0<\/span>as well as being convenient for too many cultural distractions to complete a novel).\u00c2\u00a0 It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not very logical but I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve recently quite enjoyed walking past Random House’s HQ on\u00c2\u00a0Vauxhall Bridge Road on the way to work meetings. And I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve idled away the odd lunchtime following literary walks past London\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s numerous writer\u00e2\u20ac\u201cinspired blue plaques.<\/p>\n

\"Bronte<\/a>
How They Do It in Yorkshire — Birthplace of the Brontes<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At the conference I met writers from places like Durham, Lincoln, Doncaster, Nottingham and quite a contingent few from York itself \u00e2\u20ac\u201c all places where it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t take an Olympic Games for people to be friendly to strangers. Obviously, writers can work virtually anywhere but being in central London most days means it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s easy to believe the outer limits of the publishing world coincide with the Zone Two and Three boundary. So credit to the Writers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Workshop for travelling up to York, reinforcing that there are thriving writing communities all over the country.<\/p>\n

As an aside, the inspiration provided by the British landscape to writers over the last thousand years is the subject of an engrossing exhibition at the British Library. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m aiming to blog, eventually, about visiting\u00c2\u00a0Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderland<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0<\/a>but, in the meantime, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d recommend anyone to visit in its final week and be as awestruck as I was in seeing original manuscripts by Hardy, George Eliot, James Joyce, Charlotte Bront\u00c3\u00ab and countless others. And, speaking of the wily, windy moors, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a series of photographs of the Pennine area where I grew up, which gave inspiration Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.<\/p>\n

Back to the less gritty setting of the Vale of York and, having made the generalisation that writers might be quiet sorts, it certainly doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mean they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not sociable creatures. In my own case, one of the reasons why my novel prominently features the fortunes of a pub is because I like to spend so much time there \u00e2\u20ac\u201c another reason why my manuscript still isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t quite<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0<\/em>ready to set before an agent.\u00c2\u00a0The speed with which the (sadly limited) complimentary wine was downed and replacement bottles ordered at the dinner tables, the York festival showed many writers are similarly sociably minded.<\/p>\n

\"Bronte<\/a>
Bronte Birthplace Plaque, Thornton, West Yorkshire<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And, because writers are normally scattered working in solitude all over the country this sociability has found an enthusiastic, virtual outlet in blogging and Twitter. It was probably via Twitter that I learned about the conference in the first place. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d certainly come across some of the agents attending and some very helpful blogging book doctors via Twitter \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and one of my objectives was to hunt these down, in the nicest possible way, so I could say \u00e2\u20ac\u02dchello\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 in person rather than online.<\/p>\n

My Big Two, in terms of tweeters I wanted to track down, were Debi Alper and Emma Darwin. I managed to buttonhole Debi after dinner and she introduced to me to Emma. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re both successful authors and had a long day book\u00e2\u20ac\u201cdoctoring (as well as running workshops, about which other delegates were very complimentary) but they were both very friendly and approachable. Emma\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s blog,\u00c2\u00a0This Itch of Writing<\/em><\/a>\u00c2\u00a0(see sidebar) is an antidote to all the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcFollow My Ten Rules and Write a Bestseller\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 sites and, \u00c2\u00a0now having met Emma in person, I can understand why it’s one of the most intelligent and practical resources on writing that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve found on the web.<\/p>\n

The role of literary agents in the traditional publishing process is often described as that of gatekeepers \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s said that finding representation by an agent is frequently the biggest obstacle a writer has to overcome on the road to publication. So when they emerge out of hiding behind website submission guidelines and laconic Writers and Artists\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Yearbook entries, one might imagine agents to seem as unyielding as doctors\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 receptionists from hell.<\/p>\n

\"York<\/a>
A Lovely Pub in York I Didn’t Get to Visit This Time — The Old Starre Inn Sign — Stonegate<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The great benefit of a conference like the Festival of Writing is to allow writers to discover that they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not. At least the many that decamped out of their normal habitat to spend the weekend in York, make strenuous efforts to seek out new talent (seeing half\u00e2\u20ac\u201ca\u00e2\u20ac\u201cdozen writers back\u00e2\u20ac\u201cto\u00e2\u20ac\u201cback for the intensive ten minute one\u00e2\u20ac\u201cto\u00e2\u20ac\u201cone sessions must be exhausting work \u00e2\u20ac\u201c like speed-dating with reams of A4). Beyond the scheduled one\u00e2\u20ac\u201cto\u00e2\u20ac\u201cone sessions most agents seemed perfectly approachable although the Festival Handbook reminds over\u00e2\u20ac\u201czealous delegates of protocol \u00e2\u20ac\u201c don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t try to subject your selected agent\/victim to your carefully honed three\u00e2\u20ac\u201chour elevator pitch over dinner or try and open (and close) a deal in the queue for the toilets.<\/p>\n

Given the unagented, aspiring writer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s curiosity about agents and how best to make an approach, it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t take much of a leap of imagination to imagine a David Attenborough\u00e2\u20ac\u201cstyle whispered commentary: \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcHere we see the literary agent species drawn out of its usual habitat of secluded offices in Camden, Bloomsbury and Notting Hill to gather around this alluring watering hole. And contrary to the species’ forbidding reputation, they can be observed to be a remarkably sociable group.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/p>\n

If anything, the experience of meeting agents, listening to their views on panel discussions and the like, shows they are remarkably diverse bunch: talkative extroverts, intense bibliophiles (not a reference to the festival bar), laid\u00e2\u20ac\u201cback \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcregular guy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 types and one who, oddly, reminded me of Malcolm Tucker from\u00c2\u00a0The Thick of It<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Writers who desperately want to get \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcan agent\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 are sometimes advised that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcan<\/em> agent\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 they need but the right <\/em>agent and, having seen more agents together in one place at the Festival than I ever have before, this would appear to be sound advice (see this guest blog post<\/a> I found via Twitter from A.P.Watt agent Juliet Pickering). Accordingly, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re all so different that not all are going to like your book \u00e2\u20ac\u201c but you hope that, with so many different personalities, eventually one will. That is unless you happen to have self\u00e2\u20ac\u201cpublished and have sold tens of thousands of e\u00e2\u20ac\u201cbooks already, in which case, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s likely most agents will want to shove a contract in your direction.<\/p>\n

That last point was made in one of the panel discussions on the future of publishing \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a topic no\u00e2\u20ac\u201cone seems to be able to agree on. Attitudes do seem to have recently changed to suggest that it does an author no harm to self\u00e2\u20ac\u201cpublish, if it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s done properly.\u00c2\u00a0David Gaughran<\/a>, a self\u00e2\u20ac\u201cpublished writer who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s also written about the subject, stressed in response to a concern about the overall quality of self\u00e2\u20ac\u201cpublished books, that he has access to the same freelance copy editors as used by large publishing houses.\u00c2\u00a0 Similarly, self\u00e2\u20ac\u201cpublished authors can also pay for the services of other professionals in the publishing process, such as PR agents. While this breaks the maxim of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcmoney flows to the writer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s argued that the much higher royalty rate on self\u00e2\u20ac\u201cpublished e\u00e2\u20ac\u201cbooks can be more financially rewarding overall, even on lower net sales, for an author even when such expenditure is incurred upfront.<\/p>\n

At its most basic, an author\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s journey for publication is a search for people prepared to invest money and time (and a professional\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time means money) in editing, printing, distributing and publicising your work. Each link in the chain is like a pitch from\u00c2\u00a0Dragon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Den <\/em>to persuade someone to commit resources: author to agent; agent to commissioning editor; publisher to bookseller and so on.<\/p>\n

\"York<\/a>
York Minster<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s why I found one of the most informative workshops at the Festival was The Acquisitions Meeting<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0<\/em>with Gillian Green and Michael Rowley, both editors at Random House, who are currently building a fiction list for Ebury Press.<\/p>\n

They gave an intriguing insight into the business side of publishing a novel. They explained how non\u00e2\u20ac\u201ceditorial staff, like the production director, who counts the cost of shiny covers and different grades of paper, have a vital say in whether a title will be acquired or not. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the antithesis of the literary agent’s unquantifiable ‘I just loved it’ reaction to a text \u00e2\u20ac\u201c where calculations about break\u00e2\u20ac\u201ceven print runs in a spreadsheet determine the final publication decision.<\/p>\n

Forecasts of sales are much more rigorous than finger\u00e2\u20ac\u201cin\u00e2\u20ac\u201cthe\u00e2\u20ac\u201cair. For debut authors, analysis will be made of the sales of comparable writers’ titles and existing authors will have their Nielsen Bookscan figures scrutinised. If an author’s sales have been on a declining trend then this can be a deal breaker, no matter how great their new book. A debut author\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s lack of a track-record can paradoxically work in their favour.<\/p>\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve dwelt on those elements of the conference that were particularly relevant to where I am now with my writing but, as well as content on the process of publishing, there were plenty of sessions and workshops on writing technique (voice, character, editing and so on). And probably having already written my longest post on the festival (ridiculously long for a blog) I guess I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve proved I found plenty to interest me in York.<\/p>\n

Oh, and how did I get on in my one-to-ones with literary agents, bearing in mind my initial frustration that with no finished manuscript to offer, I worried they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d be wasted opportunities? (You submit the first chapter and an \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcintroduction\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 in advance so the agent can arrive prepared.) Well, I got some very useful feedback on how to describe the novel in a covering letter and comments on extra angles I might consider in the first chapter. \u00c2\u00a0(It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s always really valuable to get a reader\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s initial reaction to the novel \u00e2\u20ac\u201c bearing in mind that most people who are kind enough to give me feedback have seen it develop as a work-in-progress.)<\/p>\n

The agents seemed to like the writing and thought it fitted the type of genre that I was aiming at (note that both asked me which writers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 novels I thought might be similar to my own). I was given positive comments on the structure of the novel, the dialogue and the writing about food (the first chapter is very culinary \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it would be interesting to find out what they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d think about themes in later chapters).<\/p>\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m told that agents, while being polite people, don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to waste their own future time by giving false encouragement which would leading writers to inundate their inboxes with further material the agent knows from the initial reading that that they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d never represent anyway. So I guess it must be encouraging that both agents said they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d like to read more of my novel when it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all ready.<\/p>\n

The agents also, perhaps most importantly, seemed to have thought carefully about whether there was a market for the novel \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and they both thought that there was, although admittedly from reading only that rather foodie first chapter. \u00c2\u00a0I was also asked by one agent if I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d had direct experience of the dramatic predicament that opens the novel. Apparently she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d had approaches from a couple of people who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been in that situation in real life and she found my description (which I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d largely imagined) very realistic and compelling, which can only be good.<\/p>\n

So no being signed up on the strength of the opening 2,700 words but I think their collective reaction was quietly encouraging.<\/p>\n

But, to underline the points about informality and networking, I stayed behind after an agent panel debate with the intention of saying hello to an agent who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d read some of my novel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s very early material at another conference a couple of years ago. I’d talked to her once since at an event at the start of the year (when I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d said the novel wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t too far off). I was pleasantly surprised that she recognised me at York and was the first to strike up a short conversation. She might have been being terribly polite but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s still a good piece of motivation to have a literary agent say goodbye to you with the words ‘I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll look forward to getting the book’.<\/p>\n

Now that might go a long way to towards explaining my uplifted mood as I drove back down the motorway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Apologies for the absence of recent updates: writing time has recently become increasingly hard to come by, although mostly in a good way, via holidays and other enjoyable events that I have hopes of getting around to writing blog posts about eventually \u00e2\u20ac\u201c I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got a nice batch of photos to upload, if nothing else. … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “York Festival Of Writing”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[94,906,900,902,901,903,154,1261,858,26,907,904,899,905],"class_list":["post-1661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-publishing","tag-agents","tag-british-library","tag-david-gaughran","tag-debi-alper","tag-emma-darwin","tag-festival-of-writing","tag-london","tag-publishing","tag-self-publishing","tag-setting","tag-wonderlands-to-wasteland","tag-writers-workshop","tag-york","tag-york-university"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1661"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1693,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1661\/revisions\/1693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}