The only thing that should ever be described as “emerging” is The Very Hungry Caterpillar out of his chrysalis.

Oh, how I loathe that word — relevant! — and the noun that accompanies it — relevance! I encounter them both a lot in the cultural sector, and they give me the ick.

What better way of challenging these unhelpful feelings than by taking my clothes off in front a room full of strangers?

I’ve been saying for years, usually to drama students in training, that audiences are always locked in a race with whatever they encounter.

Maybe there’s an interesting distinction to make between something that’s finished for now and something that’s finished for good.

In the space of thirty-six words, they have consolidated everything I'm going to keep reminding myself to do in 2025.

I took part in a workshop led by Liam Brown, exploring AI’s capacity to write good ghost stories — and by extension, our own. Who would do better — us, or it?

If there's one thing I'd like to leave you with at the end of this special, exhausting, exhilarating month, it is this — say yes to your writing by saying no to something else.

107,910 words, and still nowhere near finished — but for now, I’m content to keep wandering across the universe of this strange, sad, redemptive novel.

I’m now getting to the stage where I am required to write characters whose attitudes, opinions and experiences do not correspond to my own, in three primary and overlapping areas: sexuality, religion and politics.

I wrote my first ever sex scenes this week. Every aspect of these scenes could be viewed as a template for the kind of questions we need to ask ourselves about every single thing we write.

I’ve written a total of 24,136 words this week. Considering I pledged to finish a 90,000-word draft this month, you’d be forgiven for thinking I’m well on course.

In six days' time, I'll be embarking on a thrilling/foolhardy (you decide which) literary experiment, writing a 90,000-word novel in the space of a calendar month — and not only that, I'll be on show for at least 20 of those days, in full public view.

I've got to thinking more about a technique which I've used more often than any other in all of my writing. It's the thing which even helped to give this blog its title. I'm talking about my great love of digression.

By way of a bit of bonus content, I decided I should quickly follow up this week’s latest post with another one in which I put my money where my mouth is, by sharing an example of me putting all that I think and feel about long sentences into practice.

What does it mean to be a “professional” writer? Is it that you devote lots of your time and effort to writing? Or that you get paid for writing?

In order to say yes to one thing, you have to say no to another. That’s how time is protected. That’s how the art gets made. But it starts with you, saying yes to yourself, for yourself.

One of the big surprises from the Enzo Mari exhibition was discovering the number of different ways Mari had ventured into the world of literature.

On a recent trip to London, we finally made it to the Design Museum so we could catch the exhibition of work by the Italian design legend Enzo Mari.

The computer I’m writing on is not in the best of health today — it’s just come back from a service to investigate a defective trackpad, and is now functioning even worse than it was before.