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'My first year at Latitude it was baking with sunshine and I ended up having a drink under a tree with John Cooper Clarke, who heard one of my gloomy poems and called me 'Sylvia'.'
'As a writer, you're only in control of how good the work is. None of this means I don't feel it, if something is rejected. I know how it's going to feel now and I map out a plan. Sometimes I use visualisation to help.'
'I wake my partner, Dave, with coffee. He's a writer too, but he's not a morning person. Despite this fundamental difference between us, we're co-writers of a fantasy crime trilogy. The second instalment is due to the publisher in twenty days.'
'I would advise my younger self to get cracking on the mechanics, with discovering what writing can do. Life itself — I would tell her — will take care of your subject, what matters are the tools of your trade.'
'Neither will your choice of tea nor the type of milk you drink, nor the To-Do list chalked on the door, trigger in me any thoughts. I will live at your place in a vacuum of expectation. The one important thing your place should not contain, is you, '
'Niall Griffiths' advice was to turn it all around. He burst open the hole I'd dug for myself; suddenly, magically, there was light. Or there was once I'd got back home after having stopped to vomit in almost every lay-by on the length of the A470...'
'The only bits of marketing that do work for me, are the ones which don't directly involve me; point-of-sale materials, window displays, that kind of thing. I have an anti-talent for personal appearances.'
'The reality of my writing life isn't to do so much with the material places where I write, but the space inside my head. I don't really need a perfect setting. It's taken me years to realise.'
'You and your readers are going to be spending irretrievable time and irreplaceable energy on what you write. If you don't care about it passionately, how will you endure it, and why on earth should your readers be bothered?'
'Loneliness is the follower of bereavement and isolation; the sequel to so many sad life events. An imposition, creeping up with its cunning net. But solitude is a fresh place, chosen to create new work and connections to life outside.'
'A few weeks later, after some furious polishing, I did send David S. Garnett a story. He didn't buy it, but he did send me an encouraging letter, which included some advice I still have to consider to this day: don't try to cram in so much.'
'Harper Lee warned that writers need a thick hide, but even elephants and rhinos feel pain. No matter how hard boiled you think you are, that brief email or fat envelope in the post can always induce new and exquisite agony.'
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