Testimonials

Roman Kagramanov, @kagramana

A huge hug to you! It was such a pleasure to read this precise critique, where you laid everything out point by point. You showed me another way to build the chapters — and, more than that, you felt exactly where I was when I was writing some of the stories in this book. Thank you.

Katerina Marushko

Hello Svetlana! My deepest thanks for the incredible work you've done. It was astonishing to read. I never imagined a book I'd written for the drawer would get this kind of thorough analysis — reading you was a genuine pleasure. You're a wise, skilled, deeply educated person, and the emotions I felt are hard to put into words. Most important of all, you showed me the way forward, and you'll always be the first person I thank, in every sense. With respect, Katerina

Alan Charoit

Thank you so much — the critique is fantastic. I'll admit I didn't expect to find this much I could use. Just days earlier I'd been sitting there wondering what to do and where to go next with promoting the book, and then your answers arrived for exactly the questions I had no idea how to approach.

I'll obviously keep reading it closely and keep revising, but having your outside view of the book helped enormously, because my own eye had gone stale and a lot was slipping past me — both what could be tightened and how to actually promote it, and who the audience even is.

I should say I'm not exactly a beginner. I started out self-publishing in Russia, then AST (one of Russia's largest publishers) picked me up and we worked together for a long time — thirteen books. But I'm a beginner now in the sense that I've emigrated and I'm trying to reach an international audience, essentially going back to self-publishing, in an environment I don't know yet.

After your critique, it's far clearer to me where to go.

I was surprised how many typos turned up, since I'd had the book proofread by an editor. She seems to have let a fair amount through.

I'll definitely write about you and this critique across all my channels.

With respect, Alan

Ksenia Zaretskaya

Today you sent me the critique of my manuscript The Right of the Hungry. I want to thank you enormously for the work you put in. The Right of the Hungry is my first long-form text. My second novel, Sisters, is now in production with the Belarusian publisher OZ, and in it I'd already corrected — some by instinct, some deliberately — a great many of the problems you pointed out. It's far shorter, 600,000 characters, which probably says something in itself.

With The Right of the Hungry I was on fire, and you were right that my own voice, my own pain and anxiety, kept breaking through the heroines. I still love that text dearly and I want the world to see it one day, but I knew it couldn't go out in the shape it's in. Your critique showed me how to structure the work. It doesn't make you want to give up and cry — the opposite, it lifts you. It made clear that I've grown as a writer, since I'd caught many of those problems myself (I was 19 when I wrote it; I'm 24 now), while still leaving room to rework what's there — keeping the manuscript's strengths and stripping off the excess. Thank you especially for noticing the unnecessary ornamentation. I still get that pull toward writing "literary," with all the verbal frills, so it looks like everyone else's — but I know it's not organic to my texts, it's surplus. Your kind words about my style confirmed my decision to stay with what I do well: describing ordinary life and existence in plain words. That approach has its place too.

I'm immensely grateful for the work you did. And I'm determined to keep at it, to make this text and everything after it better. Thank you again!

Ekaterina Daibert

Hello Svetlana,

I'd been waiting for your critique! Read it cover to cover. Enormously valuable — thank you for the work. You're the first person I've shown it to at all.

Some of it really made me stop and think, especially the plot development for Yaara. I'm not going easy on her, I promise — female arcs and characters are just harder for me, which is why she comes out a little wooden.

I took a lot from your notes on the other characters too. Plenty to work on and plenty to think about.

I'm sorry I sent you an incomplete manuscript. I'd love your view on the whole thing, but the third and final part is still very raw — it's basically a frame, and I'm threading the plot onto it right now.

Thank you again for your work!

Yulia Sh.

Thank you so much for this critique! I've read all of it and I'm following the plan now.

Your note about the book's first sentence made me laugh — that some readers might close the book after the crudeness in it. That's exactly what happened with two of my readers, and I was so fond of that "itching backside" line.

There are just as many chapters still ahead, and now they're even scarier to write — but I've got a great toolkit to work with. What you do really matters: you hand over both the tools and the belief in yourself. For a beginner that's worth +10,000,000. Thank you again!

Olesya Kvashina

Thank you, I'm moved.

I got very lucky to have a professional of this caliber give such a detailed review and such good advice.