Random Musings

Category: writing

  • Caressing the words

    Plotting, Planning, Preparing We’re running a writing retreat in Wales, and it’s going exceptionally well, if I may say so. This week’s retreat is Do It. There are no daily workshops, just a group of writers spending the week writing. We provide breakfast and dinner, as well as some afternoon…

  • New Stuff

    I mentioned a while back that (I think?) that I was starting a new series. This series is a spin off of the Afterlife, Inc series, which featured the three Fury sisters as they negotiated a world where the gods began to walk among humans once again. The new series…

  • Tough Days Suck. Hold On.

    I’m still here. And the day started out pretty positive. It felt like a day to celebrate being here, rather than to reflect on how very close I came to the end. I thought of all the things I would have missed. The moments with my wife, (marrying my wife),…

  • Simplicity

    Winter solstice, 2021. We’re coming up on year two of the pandemic. That’s two years of a whole lot of darkness for a planet full of people. Not a city. Not a country. Not even a continent. An entire planet affected by a single disease. We’re living in a sci-fi…

  • Write down to the bones

    A writing retreat is an unusual beast. You see, it rips a writer open. In just seven days, the soul is exposed and the hurts that revolve around words are exposed to the sunlight, where they then proceed to shrivel and burn to ash. And in the remnants of that…

  • Hours and Hours and Hours of Words

    I write books. I don’t know if you knew that. You see, I don’t talk about it a whole lot here. I do so over on my author page (though, not very well), but I tend to reserve this blog for the more personal, more introspective stuff. But today I’d…

  • Every step

    Imagine waking up and finding that in order to get to your destination that day, you had to walk a tightrope. And anywhere you had to go after had to be via tightrope. Cafe, bakery, doctor, groceries, park…all via tightrope. And then the next day was the same. And the…

  • Permutations of Connection

    Lately, I’m unsure what it is I want to share and what it is I want to keep to myself. But I did a talk recently for the Nottingham Writer’s Studio about connection, and the way our writing keeps us connected in a variety of ways. And so I find…

  • Reflective surface pumpkin head

    A blotchy pumpkin head, ageing and spreading. A bloated bag of wind. A revolting, unappealing mixture of bumps, rolls, and general grossness. That’s what I see in the photos lately, and I hate looking at myself so much it makes my stomach churn and my eyes water. I avoid any…

  • Seeing yourself on the page

    Twelve years is a long time to do anything. I mean, not every day, but still. The Bold Strokes UK book festival is in its twelfth year. From starting out on a weeknight with a few local authors, this year we have twenty-one authors joining us from all over the…