I'm noticing more and more that devotees of AI, or AI apologists, as I prefer to think of them, are much more focused on product than process.

Writing has been how I rediscovered and retained my dignity during this weird, liberating, insecure, rewarding, exposing time in my life.

My educational attainment is pretty good. My BMI, less so. I doubt my parents would describe me as "competent" at anything. 

I honestly think the note of letting self-doubt fuel you is entirely unplayable, entirely unusable, in any creative context.

If you let them come for your milk and say nothing, next they will come for your apples, and before you know it, they come for your freedom, your life, and no amount of bleating will stop them.

"And then I realised, geez, how dependent I have been on my cellphone. But I should confess, you know, after the first day, I felt liberated."

“I saw! I know!” "He knows! Don't go home!"

Here's to a 2026 filled with daily bread — the kind we bake for ourselves, with craft and sweat and discipline and love.

Ballard's trick, or technique, or whatever you want to call it, is deceptively simple — observation, which gives the impression (especially with hindsight) of being extrapolation.

The thing I will always love about Tom Stoppard is his spectral hand in the script for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Is dickishness, I wonder, a price worth paying for access to the joys and freedoms of curiosity and imagination?

Interestingly, I have never yet met a woman who had a good word to say about Arrival.

"The vast majority of novels, including those with explicit scenes, use standard black ink. This keeps production costs down and follows the established norms of the publishing industry."

Uh-oh... Should I have got my coat and bag from the locker and just left quietly...?

So many employers profess to value wellbeing — until it comes into conflict with the productivity which they value even more.

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood."

"If you're making a statement, artistically, then when you're making that statement, as far as you're concerned, it's an absolute."

Are humans the only creatures who engineer the circumstances which bring about their own boredom?

Have you ever felt like a broken accordion sometimes?

Maybe we all need to stop using the word “like” for good; maybe we need to retire it forcibly from the English language.

Quite possibly a total nightmare for stage managers — I do sympathise with them when faced with designs and designers like these.

It's survived asteroid impacts and waves of mass extinction. It's not going to surrender lightly.

Joy is currently failing me and I’m very aware that this is a dangerous, not to mention costly, headspace for a freelancer to find themselves in.

I use it so often that I’ve got a shortcut set up on my keyboard so I can reach for one whenever I want — Shift + Option + -, pressed all at the same time, in case you were wondering.

The whole thing was not, in fact, about a young man on a boat in the middle of the ocean with a tiger and a zebra and a few other animals at all.

How do we make our work space more of a play space? What toys does it need to be filled with?

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.