I don’t know about you, but while we’ve been ‘locked down’ over the past few months, I’ve made much more of an effort to catch up with people I know, whether they’re family members, friends, work clients or casual acquaintances. Not in person, of course (I’m not a monster), but with a mixture of phone, email and video calls.
Continue readingMy new favourite author, Michael Perry*, has a theory about making it as a writer. It is, he says, like shovelling horse manure. If you keep at it long enough, sooner or later you’ll have a pile so big that people can’t ignore it any more.
In my writing, as in life more generally, I have a tendency to forget this. I seem always to be aiming for the one big idea. The thing that will bring everything together. A towering monument to my own accomplishment.
This is, sadly, just as unlikely as it is pompous. Continue reading
