Highly Irregular Newsletter #43 July 2026

Listen to me reading this post

Hi everyone,

I hope you’re all well and, if experiencing the great heat we’ve been having here in the UK, you’re finding ways to stay cool. I can’t promise it will cool you down, but I’d love for you to join me on Zoom on Sun July 12th 7-8pm UK for my next Writing Muscle Workout. Suitable for anyone writing in any word-shapes and at any stage of your writing journey, we’ll do three fun and mind-bending writing exercises in 60 mins to get that writing muscle well and truly warmed up - but hopefully not raise your body temperature at the same time!

As ever, if you can’t make it live, all ticket-holders will get a link to the recording afterwards to write along to in your own time - and, as ever, there are concessionary, free and pay-what-you-can places available! Details and booking here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/taniahershman/2215396. (Full Unbox subscribers, you’ll find your discount code at the bottom of the June Unbox post.)

I’d also love to see you on Zoom next week if you’re in academia and would like to experiment and spread your writing wings! Join me on July 7th for an online masterclass for Arvon: The Journey from Academic to General Readership: Permission to Experiment, details here, concessions available: https://www.arvon.org/writing-courses/courses-retreats/masterclass-the-journey-from-academic-to-general-readership-2/ Please do pass this on to anyone in academia who you think this might appeal to, anywhere in the world, that’s the joy of Zoom!

My latest book, It’s Time: A Chronomemoir, my hybrid musings on the nature and texture of what Time is or might be, which was published by Guillemot Press, has its first birthday on July 17th (which is also my birthday) and so I thought I’d offer you lovely subscribers a special discount - use this code TimeBirthday20 for twenty percent off through my online shop, I post worldwide and am happy to sign it too! https://taniahershman.com/product/new-book-its-time-a-chronomemoir/

Which leads me on to some news: those of you who’ve been hanging out here with me for a while know that since December 31st last year I’ve been posting audio instalments of me reading to you from the book. The book is sort of structured in a diary format and so I have been posting each instalment (which vary in length, some only one minute long!) on the same day as it was set in the book.

If you’ve been following along you’ll know that the diary format has already started going a bit wobbly as I began to wonder what all this Gregorian calendar stuff was anyway! So I’ve decided that now is a good time to stop, and the instalment on July 23rd will be the final one I’ll post. It’s not the end of the book - it’s somewhere in the middle - and I hope you don’t think I’m mean to stop now! But when the book gets to August, the sections don’t have dates at all, and so I would have to decide how much to read and when to post each instalment, and that doesn’t feel right to me.

I’m not sure how many of you have been listening, but I’ve really enjoyed reading it - I love reading my own work out loud - and I’ve had some lovely comments, so thank you to all of you who have tuned in! If you’d like to listen, all the instalments will stay accessible here https://taniahershman.substack.com/podcast and you can start from instalment #1 or dip in and out, I’ve heard that that’s also a fun way to listen! If you’d like to find out more about the book, the info is here: https://taniahershman.com/its-time-a-chronomemoir/

And this fits with my decision to take a complete Substack break for August - I’ve been posting regularly here for over 18 months, and I don’t know about all of you, but I feel like I could do with a little time off - and to give your Inboxes a break :) If you’re a paid subscriber, don’t worry, I’ll freeze your payments for the month.

I’m not sure yet, as I start to write this, what the “permission” aspect will be here, because actually I’d like your advice, whether you’ve been in this position or not! Maybe I need you to give me permission in some way? So, what this is about is the thing in the publishing world called a “synopsis”. As I mentioned here last month, I have just written the end of the book I have been working on for five years. Because I am a bit allergic to labels and genres, I find myself reluctant to call it a “novel”, but let’s just say it’s a combination of alternative history and speculative fiction! What happens next, if I want my book to be out in the world at some point, is that I will probably need to find a new agent. I had seven lovely years with my previous agent, who was a rock and my champion, and who I am so grateful for, but we found we had come to the end of our journey together three years ago, and I feel that it’s been really important for me to write this book without anyone in any way waiting for me to finish it.

So now, I look for a new agent to represent me and my book, and I did dip my toe in these waters three years ago, but swiftly withdrew the toe, because selling myself to someone makes me feel fairly uncomfortable. (That never happened with previous lovely agent, someone else introduced us.) What you do now, in many cases, is you write to an agent and, if it’s what’s known as “fiction” (yes, label allergy), you tell them a bit about the book you’ve already finished writing, generally including a few dozen pages. And a synopsis, or a summary. Of the WHOLE BOOK.

I was trained as a journalist and so I’m pretty good at summarising something in very few words. But as I looked for an agent who sounded like they might fit with me and my book, I came across one who said they wanted a synopsis which “should tell what happens in the entire story from beginning to end, including all spoilers and twists.” I don’t mind telling you I physically recoiled when I read the words “all spoilers and twists”! My body and mind were all screaming at me: Nooo! Why??? I had heard vague rumbling from friends that this is what a synopsis required but hadn’t quite believed it. And I said to myself, I don’t think I can actually DO this, it seems to go against all my story sense, everything I am as a writer.

That night, thinking about it in bed, I decided that this kind of tell-all synopsis is like reading all the stops on a Google Maps’ list of directions rather than taking the journey itself. And then a more timely metaphor popped up as I watched Wimbledon this week: it’s like looking at the score of a finished tennis game instead of watching the game itself. To sum up: it takes all the FEELING out of it, it reduces the book, the journey, the game, to a series of steps, plot points.

The next day, slightly less emotional myself, I did some more googling and came across this page on the Bath Novel Award website, with synopsis advice from a load of agents. Seems like the first agent I found is not alone:

“Give me ALL the spoilers! I think sometimes people view their synopsis as more of a pitch or blurb for their book – they don’t want to ruin the surprise or any shocking plot twists, so they hold things back to keep the mystery going. But I absolutely need to know if aliens are going to take over the school or if the evil twin turns out not to be so evil after all, so please, please, please tell me everything in your synopsis and keep the suspense and teasing for your manuscript.”

“I might choose to read the entire story without looking at your outline as I want to avoid plot spoilers and read fresh, particularly with crime.”

“Always include any twists, and the ending.”

“(I like spoilers/plot twists to be included).”

What are your thoughts on this? Have you felt pressured to do it, and how did you feel about doing it? Would you feel like me if you felt you had to do this? I can’t quite understand why an agent would even want to know they had a document which revealed everything rather than experiencing all the “spoilers and twists” as a reader would.

I’d appreciate any and all of your thoughts, including telling me I’m being silly and should pull my socks up and just do it! (Although you know how I feel about “shoulds”, I’m as allergic to them as I am to labels...)

Tania x

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