Stories, essays and updates from a UK writer
One folding table, a cash box with £4.50 float, and a spot directly between the coconut shy and the homemade jam. What a summer of fête bookselling taught me about humility, small talk, and the strange democracy of the British village green.
I gave my nan the first draft of my novel because I trusted her above all others. She returned it in a fortnight with every comma corrected and not one word about the plot. Here's what I've learned about why the people who love us most make the worst first readers — and who to ask instead.
Every Sunday at teatime, I ring my mum and read her whatever I've managed to draft that week. No track changes, no agenda — just her silences, her coughs, and the occasional 'go on then, what happens next?'. Turns out she's caught more about my prose than any critique group ever has.
Between the first print run and the twelfth, my back-cover blurb was rewritten more times than my opening chapter. Here's what a decade of trimming taught me about the most exposed prose a writer ever puts their name to.
Writing about the town you live in sounds charming until you have to sell the book to the people in it. On small-town vanity, the politics of the indie bookshop, and the conversation over the till that changed everything.
Everyone assumes a writer needs a Shoreditch flat white or a hushed library to get words down. I found my best working conditions in a garden centre café on the A38, three miles from my mum's house.
I wrote an entire first draft of a novel in a train seat that smells faintly of other people's coffee. Here's the honest maths, the unwritten rules of the quiet carriage, and why the worst seat on the 07:42 to Manchester turned out to be the best room I never rented.
Ten years of entry fees, longlists that never materialised, and one very close call in Bridport. What I actually bought with all that money — and which competitions I'd still send a story to tomorrow.
A modest offer from a mid-size publisher landed in my inbox and I nearly said yes out of sheer relief. Instead I spent a fortnight with a calculator and a cup of builder's tea, and signed with a two-room independent press in Sheffield. Here's what that decision actually cost me — and what it gave back.
I spent two years moaning that I couldn't find a 'proper' writing group, while ignoring the fact that my phone already contained four people who read my stuff, argued about it, and never once used the word 'flip chart'. Here's how a chaotic WhatsApp thread became the most useful critique circle I've ever belonged to — and the awkward Tuesday I asked a friend to swap 2,000 words.
Every January my novel gets shorter and my gas bill gets longer. This is a piece about the arithmetic nobody mentions at literary festivals: that in Britain, the writing life has a running cost, and it's measured in units on a meter.
After a decade of village halls, church back rooms and festival yurts, I've concluded that the health of any writing scene can be measured in tea, biscuits and the warmth of the buffet. Also: a rigorous ranking of biscuits by structural integrity under critiquing conditions.
A single four-letter word in my novel caused a forty-minute debate at the village reading group — about class, respectability and whether fiction is meant to be 'nice'. Here's what I learned about British readers, and why I'm keeping the word in.
For ten years I planned the Edinburgh trip — the Fringe show, the epic novel, the writer I was sure I'd become by August. This is what happened the one August I actually boarded the 4am train, and what it taught me about the difference between ambition and intention.
Inspired by Dylan Thomas, Roald Dahl and half the canon, I spent November drafting my novel in an unheated outbuilding. Here's what frostbite, a dodgy kettle and one heroic thermos taught me about why Britain writes its best books at the bottom of the garden.
When my publisher offered me exactly nothing in the way of a tour budget, I booked six independent bookshops myself and pointed the car at the M62. What I found in Doncaster, Wakefield and Stockport was warmer, stranger and more useful than anything London ever gave me.
I've ditched streaming services, meal kits and a meditation app I used twice. But my library card — free, plastic, slightly bent — has outlasted them all. Here's why borrowing beats owning, and why our libraries need us to say so out loud.
There's a particular flavour of British self-destruction that involves checking your book's reviews at 11pm with a mug of cold tea beside you. This is the story of the one that got under my skin — and the slow, unglamorous process of getting over it.
My sharpest editors have never been literary types. They're the Tuesday night crowd in a draughty village hall — and they don't care about my career, which is exactly why they're useful.
Everyone imagines the book tour as a waterstones window and a BBC sofa. Mine started with a folding chair in a village hall in the rain, and honestly, I'd take that over the sofa. Here's why the small gigs are the ones that matter.