Hello friends. You don’t need me to tell you that we’re living through a very unusual time at the moment; things are strange and scary and unpredictable, and everybody has been affected in one way or another. As a doctoral student, I’m lucky in that my research generally involves a […]
Keep readingCategory: Personal
#VSS365: Round Up (Oct ’19 – Feb ’20)
I’ve heard it said that accountability is a great catalyst for motivation. If you’re striving to achieve something, letting the people around you know what that something is can drive you to work harder towards it. It’s good advice, which is why in the past I’ve announced my intention to […]
Keep readingOne Hundred Failures
Part of being a writer is learning to deal with failure. Failures come in all forms and contexts, of course, but I’ve found that for a writer the most common and most keenly-felt form of failure is rejection. Whether you write poetry, prose, screenplays, scripts, or pretty much anything else, […]
Keep reading2019 Retrospective
Hey folks. 2019 has almost reached its end, and oh boy has it been a year. The recent general election in the UK has cast something of a ghastly shadow over the year as a whole, and over the past few days I’ve been struggling to look past that, to […]
Keep readingThe Big 100 Reading Challenge: Eight Years Later
Hey! This post isn’t related to NaNoWriMo, this month’s defining project, but if you want to know how that’s getting along you can read my daily updates over on Patreon. Back in the youthful years of the yesterlands, I had a blog dedicated to book reviews, TV reviews, and long […]
Keep readingNaNo AutoBio, or: A Chronicle of Failure
Hey gang! It’s NaNoWriMo, or Alex Doesn’t Live Up To His Own Expectations Month, everybody’s favourite madcap dash to write a 50,000 word novel in thirty days. I’ve been participating in NaNoWriMo for eight years now (I think), and during that time I’ve taken many different approaches to the challenge. […]
Keep reading#VSS365: Round Up (Aug/Sept 2019)
Out of breath, slick with sweat, fringe plastered to my forehead, I doggedly sprint towards making a blog post in a timely manner. Not yet, I say out loud and also in italics, but soon. If you aren’t familiar with #vss365 already, I wrote an introductory post about it here; […]
Keep reading#VSS365: Round Up (July 2019)
Hi guys! As you may have already heard, I’ve been writing (or attempting to write) twitter-friendly prompt-inspired microfictions every day for the last month as part of the #vss365 project. I’m enjoying this exercise a lot, and plan to continue doing it as often as I can, but it seemed […]
Keep readingTaking Part in #VSS365
If you’re following me over on twitter you might have noticed me posting tweets with the #vss365 tag regularly over the last week or so. I became tangentially aware of vss365 through the writing community on twitter, but it took me a little bit of digging to figure out what […]
Keep readingProper Hello
Let me introduce myself, by which I mean let me copy-paste my about section into a blog post (in my defence, there’s only so many times you can rewrite your own autobiography before your very veins fill with the icy chill of existential horror). As a result of this rushed […]
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