Like a lot of aspiring writers, I have spent an inordinate amount of time and energy on what my characters say. Recently though, inspired my infatuation with the style of ‘worldbuilding’ you can only find in metal songs, I have started to think about where they say it. Not the content of the voice, but…
It’s been a productive week, I have now drafted 7 of the initial 11 short stories for the first anthology. After a bit of a wobble last week, where I realised that I had been mapping this out for a year, written about half of what I intended and after all that, the output is…
18th March 2026 So, today is a scheduled, slow, easy pace run before my secret half marathon on Sunday. Secret because it was supposed to be a 10k supporting race on the way to the Bristol half marathon in May, but for one reason or another (I’m a bit crap) I never sent my entry…
The Archive always smells different when you come back. I don’t know how else to put it. You’ve been inside an incursion site, the specific wrongness of a place the Echo has been pressing on, pressing back on you for what seems an eternity, but in reality is probably no longer than a few hours,…
You cannot sit and ignore the world, and then complain when the world ignores you back Building out a story universe is one of those things that, it seems, everyone has some advice for. When I began building out the Echo Walkers Universe 10 months ago, it was an idea borne from, ‘what if my…
The Archive has a name for the depth I reached. I read it once in a monitoring report, clinical and precise, the way the Department of Residual Thought names everything that frightens them. I understood, reading it, that the name existed because someone had reached this depth before me. I understood, reading it, that they…
“When you decide to do something, remind yourself that it is committment, not motivation that matters.” Prof. Steve Peters When I was first putting this blog together I called it ‘The Resolution of Illogical Conflict’ because it sounded cool. It is a really mangled quote from a film I quite like, but imagine my surpirse…
“Nobody likes to change. There will always be resistance to change, and there always will be change. And the quicker you get to that, the easier it is.” Nick Nolte I have always been cursed with being single minded. This has some positives, but in retrospect, there are a ton of things that I struggle…
“Eat at a local restaurant tonight. Get the cream sauce. Have a cold pint at 4 o’clock in a mostly empty bar. Go somewhere you’ve never been. Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you. Order the steak rare. Eat an oyster. Have a negroni. Have two.” – Anthony Bourdain. We…
“Perseverance is not a long race, it is a series of short races, one after the other.” – John Quincy Adams Training for Bristol feels different. At the beginning of my running journey, I seemed to hit a nice cadence, to the point of elation after my first 9k run. Sure, I had to attempt…
