Bubblecow edited my third serious novel, Shemlan – A Deadly Tragedy. Apart from a good clean edit of the MS and an amount of clear, relevant and useful advice and insight on how to polish a number of scenes in the book, the edit came back with a pretty brave but most definite piece of advice. The book was constructed around a present day narrative with flashbacks to the protagonist’s time in Beirut back in 1978 and his subsequent life as a diplomat in the Middle East. These were interwoven with the main story, which details how he returns to Beirut in the present day, dying of cancer, to rediscover the love he lost when he left back in the seventies. His past catches up with him so quickly and with such violence it threatens to kill him before the disease does. Kill the flashbacks, said Bubblecow. All of them. Wow. That was 30,000 words of rewrite right there. It takes an editor with cojones to make a call like that. I rolled up my sleeves and did it, reasoning that as I’d paid good money for Bubblecow’s advice and experience, I might as well suck it up and follow their counsel. I am very glad indeed that I did. They were right. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is about as much as you could ask of any editor.