Just before Christmas I was browsing in my local bookshop and I came across a journal called ‘Scribble-out Poetry’. In this journal there are individual pages of sample text from some of history’s greatest works, ready to be blacked out with a marker to form poetry. But what is Scribble-out Poetry? A quick internet search […]
Tag: writing
For those of you who don’t know, I work in a bookshop which happens to sell my books, and every time one of my books sells, I’m always amazed. I feel a mixture of anxiety, surprise, happiness and doubt. This doesn’t just happen with my books though, I make things too and when they sell, […]
About a week ago as part of National Crime Reading Month, I attended a talk about writing Historical Crime. Three authors, Matthew Booth, J. C. Briggs and Deborah Swift spoke about historical crime and how they went about their writing. As an author, I find the writing process fascinating and I’m always looking for advice […]
The dissertation is something that has been on the horizon for any student. I had wanted to do a creative writing dissertation since I knew it was an option and I was lucky that I managed to get in. I wanted to challenge myself. Instead of working on a project I had already started or […]
I Submitted My Poems and Prose To 100 Different Places… Now What? For the past two years, I’ve taken part in a challenge I’ve named the 100 Rejections Challenge. I’ve explained a bit more about it and my reasons for undertaking such a challenge in another blog post, but for the purposes of this one, […]
It’s August 2018: the worst month of my life. My paternal grandparents died of cancer a week apart, and at each funeral I had to see my estranged father and his wife. I haven’t had a relationship with them since 2012. My love of karaoke was being strangled by the dismal pubs I was placed […]
My Favourite Novels I Studied As Part of My Degree (in no particular order) As part of reflecting on my experiences at university, it would be bizarre not to include discussions about the novels I studied as part of my English Literature degree. We studied a wide range of texts, including plays and poetry but […]
I know that the last thing anyone wants to hear about right now is the pandemic. Regardless of how we are with vaccination rates and ability to keep up with new strains, we’re still sharing a world with coronavirus. I have this irrational dread that a new, vaccine resistant variant will choke slam us to […]
What You Can Learn from My Essay Writing Process/University Experiences After having my nose to the grindstone for four months, I have finally finished all of my assignments for university. Due to an episode of poor mental health in the run up to my May deadlines, I had to ask for an extension until August, […]
One of my last ever university courses was Working in the UK Screen Industries. The module was about the working practices and procedures involved, the unions and other organizations that advocated for workers’ rights and diversity. The subject material itself was pretty dry, and there were a whole bunch of studies and industry texts to […]