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

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