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Writing East Midlands Mentoring Scheme
This time last year I was in the thick of preparing our move from Germany back to the UK. My wife and I had work lined up and I think we’d even managed to find the house we ended up moving to. I was...
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Done and Dusted.
After three years of intensive study, years of writing, redrafting and editing, the MA is done. I printed and bound the novel back at the end of September, posted it off and received my confirmation of...
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Titles seem to be the hardest words.
The Millions posted an interesting piece a few days ago in which various writers discuss the process of titling their work. You can read it here and it’s well worth a look. It got me thinking about the...
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So this is 2015
The end of January already? How did that happen? The fact that I have drafted two previous opening lines to this post (the first about how it is already two weeks into the year, the second how it is...
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My 2014 in review
Reaching the end of the year is always a time for reflection, so here goes. 2014 was the year my first book, Looking Out of Broken Windows, was published, and as such was a year of firsts. I had my...
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The Importance of Being Mentored
About this time last year I was lucky enough to be selected for the Writing East Midlands’ mentoring scheme, a fantastic opportunity to be mentored by a successful author for six months, with the...
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Counting Words vs Words That Count
Since I started writing I have been interested in the process and methodology of successful writers. I find other writer’s habits, particularly those of my favourite authors, intriguing, and often the...
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Writing goodlyer Inglish
For much of the last year, I have been working as a First Story writer-in-residence at Judgemeadow Community College in Leicester. This has involved delivering 16 workshops over the last eight months...
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When It’s Human Instead of When It’s Dog
Amy Hempel’s work holds a special place in my personal canon of short story authors. I first discovered her stories when beginning to write my own. This was back in 2009 and I was grabbing up every...
View Articleforegroundmusic: New Space Music
Discovered (via the magnificent Warren Ellis) that there was an edition of Brian Eno’s Neroli with an extra track called New Space Music. Neroli has long been a go to piece of writing music for me, so...
View Articlenew_novel.doc (OST)
Put the finishing touches to the latest edit of my novel this morning. Just hit send to my agent and hoping that the changes hit the spot and this baby can start making its way out into the world. For...
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Walter Benjamin’s Rules for Writing
I’m a bit of a sucker for writing rules, even though I know that there really are no rules. I suppose what I really like is what they tell me about another writer’s process. This list of thirteen rules...
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foregroundmusic: Hotel Neon
Been doing a lot of editing of what appears to be coalescing into a collection of weird/eerie/uncanny short stories* which appear to be whacking about in woods haunted by the themes of death, doubles,...
View ArticleTen favourite sentences (in no particular order)
A long time ago now, editors at the American Scholar selected the Ten Best Sentences in literature. Their list included prose from James Joyce, Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway and others....
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It’s Okay Not to Know
Writing short fiction is an exercise in not knowing. When I begin any story, I know very little about what will emerge onto the page. I don’t know where my story will go, what it is about, or where it...
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