The first post in the Writing IRL series. Writing is a lengthy process. You might have an idea for a story or an article that is almost completely formed in your head, twists and turns and characters and dialogue all
The Internet seems to be half full of writers with infinite time and money on their hands. They advise aspiring writers to spend 8 hours a day reading and then spend another 8 hours writing - anything, everything, whatever comes
"'Why, one day you'll get to eat at the heavenly table,' the man said. 'Won't be no scrounging for scraps after that, I guarantee ye.'" I have friends (no, really!) who joke that I buy them books not because I
‘Every now and then, all a woman needs is a good throttling.’ This is what Ollie Splendid tells me, wearing a practiced evil grin, as he places his skinny feet in their heavy boots on the coffee table between us,
“Have you ever been lonely? No, neither have I. Solitary, yes. Alone, certainly. But lonely means minding about being on your own. I've never minded about it.” Mike Engleby is an odd young man, a loner. A student at a
"Kind? How boring that would be. I aspire to be wicked." Until I began listening to the Song of Ice and Fire books, I never really considered audiobooks as an option for consuming novels. If I was going to read,
"This isn't a tough love mission to turn the wayward back to the straight and narrow." A girl is missing, and her daddy's body is in a barn with a pitchfork stuck through it, bloated and bloody and stinking like
"If such a thing had happened once, it must surely have happened many times in this galaxy of a hundred billion suns." I don't often read sci-fi. It's not that I have anything against the genre; that which I have
So you're a writer. And you're sick of working for The Man, and you've finally finished your latest attempt at a novel, and you want to make a proper go of it, after all these years of half-arsed writing whenever
I want to write more blog posts. I do. Whenever I have time to think, I spend it trying to think about things I could write about. How I feel about a certain topic, perhaps, or an idea for a
I’d only just sat down really, and I certainly hadn’t started doing anything worthwhile, when I heard the knock on the door. ‘You’re in my cubicle,’ the voice said. It was a deep voice, belonging to a man
The kids run around the pool playing a game, the rules of which seem undecipherable even to those participating, and the noise they make is that of savages and wild animals and the dying and the dead. Some of
