1. Read every day. A writer who doesn’t read is like a cook who doesn’t eat. And - this is important - don’t just read the books you like to read. Cast your net wide, read outside your comfort zone. Try different genres, different periods, different authors. You might learn something.

2. Write every day, even if it’s not a lot. Like any skill, ( Read more... )

So, in the news, Joseph A. Stack, a software engineer from California and now living in Texas, wrote an impassioned (and only occasionally incorrectly-spelled) diatribe against the various institutions in the US, set fire to his house with his wife and child inside, climbed into a plane and flew it into the nearest IRS office.

Now, skimming the ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Here it is ( Read more... )

Does my succession of new hats never cease?

Bit of background here:

Jetse de Vries, the editor of the Shine Anthology (which I sent off to press a few days ago - it's gonna be properly awesome, by the way; I haven't bothered to pimp any of our books on this blog so far, but this one I urge you to go and grab this spring), has been running a ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Attention journalists!

In January in the UK, the sky sometimes shoots ice at people. This is an established fact, and no-one is very surprised. It is not newsworthy.

Right now, people are being raped and murdered, politicians are lying and philandering, brush conflicts are happening in troubled areas of the world, peace treaties are being drafted and ( Read more... )

Cool photos of the weather the last few days:

( Cut for space. )

Sixteen years I have been in this country. Sixteen Christmases. I have seen snow many times, fallen on my ass countless times, but I have never, in spite of all the fuss about it, all the snow-laden christmas cards, seen a White Christmas. It just doesn't snow on Christmas Day in this country. This year included.


( Read more... )