In my last post, I shared the news that I signed with an agent, Jessica Hare, for my novel Butterfly of Night (and hopefully many more). I had enough interest in that news to make it feel worthwhile to write a follow-up post giving a bit more information about the whole process and how it …
Agents, Avoiding Reality, and The Future™
This isn’t really a blog post, as such — I seem to have lost the knack of that. I thought when the lockdown started I might start blogging regularly (to track the passing of days, if nothing else; to leave some record of all this that’s more comprehensible than my scribbled journal), but the fact …
Truth, Names, and Choice
I don’t really make New Year’s Resolutions anymore. They’re too much pressure, and the emphasis on success or failure to achieve some arbitrary change no longer seems like a particularly helpful way of approaching things. But it’s still nice to see a new year as an opportunity to begin some new project, or set oneself …
Dancer In Recovery
I am trying to remember how my body works. No, that’s not quite right. I know how it works. I know the stiffness of my knees in the morning, the strain of that early cycle into work. I know the clicks and clunks of my spine as I shift in an uncomfortable chair, the way …
Dear Younger Me, from the Future
I thought about writing a regular post summing up the past year and the decade before it, but that seemed like a cliché, so I decided instead to write a letter to my younger self — the person I was as the year turned from 2009 to 2010. Dear younger me, It’s hard to know …
Fear and the Future
In the aftermath of the election, it’s hard to know what to say. Maybe it’s easier to say nothing, to let it pass unremarked as so many things do on this blog these days, but that feels dishonest. I have so much I want to say; it’s articulating it that’s the hard part. I’ve started …
Wolves In My Skin
As November draws to an end, I thought I would update you a little on my NaNoWriMo project this year, a retelling of the medieval French story of Bisclavret.
From Student to Trainee
So, as most of you are probably aware, in September I started a year-long post as a graduate trainee librarian at Christ’s College, Cambridge. The aim of the role is that I get to learn the ins and outs of academic librarianship, gain experience across all the varied requirements of the role, and work out …
Eleven Novembers
November again. It seems to come around so quickly. I think I’ve forgotten how to blog. I sat down with my lovely, empty site, and the knowledge that I could write whatever I wanted, in whatever style, and not feel like I was breaking with any kind of tradition. A new start! A clean page! …
De-Inventing Myself
Today, I deleted nine years’ worth of posts from this blog. Around 800 posts. Probably hundreds of thousands of words. Years of my younger self figuring out who I was, talking about my life, sharing my thoughts, slowly developing my skills as a writer and as a person as I continued to live my life …