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

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!"

Whatever you’re reading at the start of 2026, I wish you joy in discovering some new friends and in reconnecting with some old ones.

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.

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."

You never know when you’ll read something that proves itself to be grimly, magnificently prophetic within your own lifetime.

I'm twitching nervously because I've realised we’re venturing into the territory of reader-response criticism here...

"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."

Have you ever felt like a broken accordion sometimes?

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.

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

The True Voyage Is Return anthology and podcast are now live!

I’m doing my little bit to reclaim the concept of manual labour for myself and for creative people in a very literal (and literary) fashion.

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.

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.

You’re not accountable to them. Only to yourself. So, really, you might just as well uphold your own truth in the first place — in writing, and in all other things.

While I’ve never, ever gone in for writing every day myself, it is something I have encouraged some other people to do, under certain circumstances.

In recent weeks, I've been prioritising actual writing (of new creative work) over what we might uncharitably call pretend writing (such as this blog).

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.

If writing long sentences is the crime that readability analysis (including on this site) makes it out to be, then many of the nineteenth and early-twentieth century writers who have had a big influence on me are serial offenders.

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?

On the basis that you’re supposed to write the books you want to read, that’s precisely what I’m setting about doing.

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.

It can be hard enough sometimes to find the right words to express yourself in your primary language - and it takes even more energy and courage to try doing it in a language you may have learned alongside, or much later in life than, acquiring your first.

I’ve drawn on Japanese literature and culture a few times over the years, and I’ve been asking myself whether I would, could or should do those projects now in the same way I did them then.

Even though theatre was where I first got properly started as a writer, and even though theatre has been where my career has focused for the last twenty years, I stopped referring to myself as a playwright long ago.

I have to confess that I’ve become a bit impatient with people who say they would like to write, but who don’t actually do any writing. I can’t think of many circumstances, even in times of the greatest extremity, when it would be totally impossible for someone to write if they really wanted to.

Something has happened to the word “art” and its offshoots — “artist”, “artistic”, “the Arts” — in recent years, and it troubles me. More and more, the word “art” seems to be being replaced by the word “creativity”. “Creative” as a noun and as an adjective often appears in places where “artist” and “artistic” used to be found. “The Arts” is now a very rare phrase to come across indeed.

How much research to do, and then what to do with it, has always been something I’ve struggled with, no matter whether I’m writing for theatre, writing prose, shaping the texts for exhibitions, or anything else.

One of the things that marks out a great writer for me is when something they have written in fiction eventually seems to be paralleled by something that happens in real life, often years or decades after they’ve written it.

Forgetting time and money for a minute, I might as well start this blog with one of the things which held me back from writing my first novel for many, many years — the presumption that there was one right way to do it, and therefore a million wrong ways to do it.