Blogs about Writing

The law of conservation of energy says that, within a closed system, energy cannot be created or destroyed: only converted from one form of energy to another. In 2023 - a year filled with personal …

In the latest newsletter I wrote: Feeling sorry for myself after a rough morning of writing, I put on the 2003 Metallica documentary Some Kind of Monster and half-watched while making collages out of kids’ …

I have been unable to describe the shape of my body. Birds sing laments, mourning for our forgotten winter in a language only they know, nonsense to me. The sky is a sermon printed on …

I used to think there was nothing more embarrassing than to write about the internet. It wasn’t literary, I thought, and to give it a place in my fiction would be to admit not only …

Over in Every, I wrote about how writing is more than a method for capturing ideas, it’s a way of exploring them: By externalizing your thoughts, writing puts you into conversation with yourself. It’s always …

In which I embark on a quixotic quest to make a physical book using web rendering technology.

Usually I wait until I’m done with a book to write about it, or at least until I’ve formed an impression; but I have a suspicion that the most interesting dimension of Ottessa Moshfegh’s DEATH …

It's been a quiet start to the year here on the blog, with almost a quarter of it now gone already and nothing said.That's mostly because it has been a quiet time writing-wise - although …

Several years ago, I reviewed a classic Scottish notebook: the Alwych Book. I bought mine at a shop in New York, but I think they’ve always been easier to find in the UK. However, thanks …

The Washington Post has an excellent story by Mary Ilyushina today about the Ukraine war’s ideological effects on Russian universities. I doubt the many opinioneers attacking recent American campus activism will acknowledge any parallels. This …

Ryan Murdock joins me in today’s episode. We talk about his new book A Sunny Place for Shady People: How Malta Became One of the Most Curious and Corrupt Places in the World. The interview …

I have a story set in the modern day with supernatural traces, with three characters: a young boy, his bio dad, and his adoptive dad. The boy and his bio dad are Indian, the adoptive …