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

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 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

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