Stories, essays and updates from a UK writer
My output has seasons whether I like it or not — the brooding winter manuscript, the abandoned August half-novel, the essay written during a rainy bank holiday. Rather than fight the weather, I've started scheduling around it. A craft argument, with bar charts I've made up.
Every bookshelf is an autobiography nobody meant to write. Mine has a chapter about a January fitness phase, an ex with excellent taste, and three years of pretending I'd finish Ulysses. Time for a tour.
Publishing day is sold to us as a triumphal arc: the announcement, the window display, the bestseller list. Here's what one actually looks like — 6am to midnight, sales dashboard open, hope and spreadsheet in hand.
Forget the high-street chains and the shushing libraries. The best writing spots in Britain are hiding in plain sight, attached to parish churches, run by volunteers, and staffed by people who would never dream of rushing you off your one cup of tea.
Every writer has one: the manuscript that quietly gave up somewhere around the halfway mark. Mine packed in at 42,000 words, and after a year of pretending it didn't exist, I finally opened the file to work out what went wrong.
I queried forty UK literary agents with my novel and tracked every response like an obsessive. The results: average wait of 54 days, exactly two personalised rejections, and one full manuscript request that kept me going for months. Here's the data, because nobody else shows you theirs.
Everyone assumes the novelists' apprenticeship happens in creative writing MA seminars. Mine happened in a bookshop in Sheffield, mostly while explaining where the toilets were. Here's what three years of shelf-tidying and Monday-only customers taught me about putting sentences together.
I spent three years chasing follower counts and feeling vaguely sick every time I opened the analytics. Then I stopped, and something odd happened: the writing got better. Here's my case for staying small, on purpose.
It started with a secondhand copy of a forgotten memoir and a scribbled reference in the margins. It ended, four months later, with me in a basement reading room in King's Cross being handed a box of letters by an archivist who deserved a medal. This is what happened in between.
Forget grand adventures and exotic backdrops — Liam argues that the richest material in British life is hiding in plain sight, from a delayed Northern rail service to the queue at the village shop. A reflection on the quiet art of paying attention.
From a battered Penguin classic picked up for 50p to a library loan that changed everything, Liam shares the seven books that made him a writer — plus his tried-and-tested tips for finding them cheap across the UK. Consider this your reading list and your money-saving guide in one.