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

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

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

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