Blog

Publishing Your Book In Time For Christmas?

3rd November

At this time of year, many of the writers I work with—and I’m usually juggling between three and six book projects at various stages of progress—ask the same question: ‘Do you think we can publish in time for Christmas?’ It’s ...

The Myth Of The 'Perfect' Writer

27th October

Somewhere, out there in the collective imagination, there’s said to be a creature known as the perfect writer.They wake early, of course. They glide downstairs to their desk (spotless, naturally) and open their laptop to a symp ...

Why Shakespeare Would Have Written For EastEnders

20th October

Last week, I wrote about the idea that some grammar rules are made to be broken- and how the real artistry of language lies not in rigid obedience to convention, but in knowing when to bend the rules to make something sound righ ...

Why Captain Kirk Was Right...

13th October

There’s a special kind of British pride in obeying rules. We love queues, we love manners, we love saying sorry when someone stands on our foot… …and we simply live for correcting other people’s grammar-and usually with more z ...

The Things You Don't See

6th October

Most people think writing is about putting words on a page. Sit down. Type. Job done. But the truth? The finished piece is only the tip of the iceberg. What you don’t see is everything beneath the surface: the false starts, ...

Don't Mind The Gap

29th September

We don’t talk enough about white space. Not the white space of empty rooms or clean canvases. But the white space on the page. The gaps. The pauses. The room to breathe. You may have noticed this in these blogs. It’s becom ...

We (Shouldn't) Have To Talk About Content

22nd September

Once upon a time, writers wrote books, artists created art, and broadcasters broadcast. Simple. Clear. Noble, even. Now? We all just ‘produce content’. Yes, congratulations are in order-whether you’ve just spent a decade sl ...

Why I Believe In The Long Read

15th September

We now live in a world where ‘BREAKING NEWS!’ flashes across screens every few minutes, where punchy one-liners and bite-sized ‘content’ are served up to be skimmed and scrolled past before the kettle’s boiled. I don’t deny the ...

A Proof Readers Nightmare

8th September

If punctuation marks had personalities, the apostrophe would be the fussy old uncle at a family gathering: always around, often misunderstood, and the subject of many heated debates and the collective rolling of eyes. Because o ...

The Not So Humble Bracket: A History

1st September

Brackets. Parentheses. Call them what you will, those two little curved lines that quietly usher themselves into our sentences, pulling along an afterthought, an explanation, or sometimes just a muttered aside we weren’t brave ...