Kill your darlings is a common saying to writers. It refers to those times in the editing process when you identify that something is not required in your story and, even if it is a lovely piece of prose, you delete it. Yep, you kill your darling. I recently got to experience that in all its truth. I have a story of which I’m really proud. I wrote it deep in my recent period of non-writing nearly two years ago. Before I wrote it, it constantly haunted me. On the bus, it was t

I haven’t bothered to write down any New Year’s resolutions this year. I didn’t come close to attaining last year’s goals so figure what’s the point in recycling them, or worse, adding to them? I don’t need that pressure. Clearly, I need to do something different. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t go totally off the rails in 2025. I wrote a little bit, I exercised fairly regularly, and I mostly ate sensibly. I just didn’t do any in the volume or with the regularity I hoped I wou

One thing I’ve really learned from knowing so many authors is that luck plays a big part in getting published. You submit exactly what the publishing house is looking for at the right time, you bump into that agent at a conference when they are in the market for new authors, you tap into the zeitgeist at just the right moment. Sure, you have to write an engaging story that is a good read, but there are millions of those out there without a home. Luck is the final bit of magic

Okay, so I’m going to out myself as a freak here; I don’t have any streaming services. Even more weird; I watch free to air TV. Now those admissions are out of the way, I can share that I binged a TV show last night. Difficult to do with the restrictions I admitted to before, but while I may watch free to air TV, I don’t watch it in real time. I record everything on a PVR (like a VCR but digital, why it’s not called a DVR I don’t know) so I can skip past the ads. Anyway, I

Last week I spent a fairly large chunk of my weekly salary on a visit to the dermatologist. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that she did a lot of study to get there. Also, two biopsies later she uncovered a pre-cancerous spot that now won’t get a chance to kill me. So, I believe it’s money well spent. But the other thing she advised me I had several of were senile warts . Ugh, gross, right? I’m not sure if the senile refers to the wart itself, which grows quite flat and l

For me, the new year starts when I go on leave from work. That was over a week ago. In that time, I’ve been seriously mulling over what I want 2025 to look like. The echoes of similar wishes for change last year hang over me like a guillotine and I feel like time is running out; I’m getting older. But then again, I felt like that when I turned 30. And again at 40. In reality, we only ever have a moment of time and that moment is now. I had now back then and I have now… w

I always say that I’m only scared of two things; doctors and dentists. For a person who spends a lot of time in the world of sci fi, horror and paranormal fiction, they seem like pretty pedestrian and boring things to be afraid of. But recently I have realised there is a third thing to add to that list... Failure. It’s no secret that for the last four or five years I haven’t written much. I’ve tried to blame that on everything from work stress to perimenopause. The big hiat

I was recently asked to be a judge for a short story competition. Despite my full-blown imposter syndrome, I accepted the invitation as part of my ‘doing something differently in 2024’ mantra. Having entered several competitions over the years, I was keen to see the other side. Let me start by saying that there are some great writers out there. Even the stories that weren’t in the running for the top 5 were still entertaining and swept me up in their storylines. It’s terrib

My definition of speculative fiction.

I don’t like being afraid of things. I’m that idiot who goes outside to investigate the weird noise in the middle of the night, or looks inside the ancient, mysterious box even when the scary music is playing. So, I opened the work-in-progress to see if it was as bad as I remembered... It kind of was. I had point of view slips and inconsistent characterisation. Really rookie stuff. It also felt like a bunch of 500-word attempts mashed together, which, in fairness, it was. M

I definitely owe Doug a coffee. Instead of joining my pity party about no-one reading my writing, Doug pointed out the bleedingly obvious; I don’t tell anyone about it. Apparently, I haven’t posted on my Facebook, Insta or Twitter accounts about my blog and website. I was somehow expecting the universe to just magically funnel readers to my site. I have to confess, I rely on the universe to do a lot of things for me; give me story ideas, find my true love, direct traffic to

I haven’t worked on my short story for just over two months. It is sitting at 2,222 words exactly. The numbers-weirdo in me likes that figure, perhaps that’s why I left it there? Or perhaps I know I’m butchering the story and I don’t want to keep inflicting more damage? I can’t even bring myself to open it and read it. I can watch the movie of the story in my brain at will, and it is great in the fully immersive experience of my imagination. But the written version is like

Every now and then Einstein's definition of insanity wafts through my brain in a pungent reminder that this Groundhog Day of my life is of my own making; doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is insane. So, I’ve decided to make 2024 the year of doing something different. Lots of somethings. This month’s folly was to attend a Crime Writing workshop. I expected to sit in a room of mostly middle-aged women and get told a bunch of things I co

It has never taken me so long to write a short story as the one I’m writing now. I know the storyline, and so far it is doing everything my imagined-on-the-bus version did. In the old days these were the stories that would trap me at my computer for five hours and I’d write 8,000+ words in a day to get it finished. I’m trying to work out what has changed. This story is meant to be an allegory for something pretty ugly. This makes the writing process a tough slog, because wh

There’s a great trick for blocked writers; if new words don’t come, edit some old ones. I took that advice recently and dusted off an old story which I wanted to set free. I’d sent it off in the past, always awkwardly tweaking it to meet the criteria for one anthology or another, but it never quite fit. So, I edited out all the stilted rubbish and left it standing on its own feet, exactly as I had imagined it. Fate then pointed me in the direction of an anthology which seem

There are three types of writers; planners, pantsers, and plantsers. Planners (unsurprisingly) plan their stories before they write them, documenting the story arc or the main turning points in the action. Apparently, some even write backstories for all their characters and fill volumes of pretty notebooks with conflict/goal/motivation exploration. Pantsers sit down and start writing. They usually have an idea of where the story is going, but use the process of writing to e

I got a nice rejection today. I’m going to paraphrase, but it went something like this… Hi Natalie, thanks for considering [magazine name]. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t quite work for me, but I wish you luck with placing it elsewhere. It’s nice because; It uses my name, which makes it a lot more personal than ‘dear author.’ It is polite, thanking me for submitting my (if I’m honest) bit rubbish story. It is positioned as personal preference, suggesting it doesn’t w

I wrote a weekly blog for over ten years. It was full of writing tips and the occasional funny medical story (I've had some weird issues over the years). In 2020 I shut it down because social media seemed to have killed the art of blogging and, quite frankly, I had an audience of three people. I swore I'd never bother with one again. Just over two weeks ago I had to get my beautiful cat put down. She was 15 years old and had lived with me for the last 12 of them. I used to ta