Book of the Month - The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan. Full review here.Since our four-month-old son was born, our lives have been turned upside down. He’s our second child, so we were expecting it. But you forget the gritty reality of those first fe...
Book of the Month - The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan. Full review here.What do you still carry forward from your childhood and what have you discarded? I remember thinking that making ‘pizza’ by grilling a baguette with cheese, onion and tomato past...
Book of the Month - The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan. Full review here.I’ve been thinking this week about how I write. There’s the maxim to ‘Write what you know’, but does Steven King know all those terrors? How did Tolkien experience Middle Earth?...
[This week’s fiction touches on suicide. If this isn’t a good thing for you to be reading about, please delete this email. I believe suicide is never the answer, getting help is. For helplines anywhere in the world, click here. We need you.]There’s a...
[Housekeeping - I’m going to add links for book recommendations. These are NOT affiliate links (yet). They just let me experiment with placements/formatting, etc. Let me know what you think of them.]Have you ever wondered what stories inanimate objec...
Writing this week's email was like wading through tar. The harder I fought, the worse it got. I was afraid of sharing this week's story and each time I stared at the near blank page, the fear would bubble up. I think fear, like false perceptions, are...
[Housekeeping] The next few weeks might be a little darker than up till now. I try to explore the full spectrum of human emotion in my writing, and it has just happened that a few on the other side are going to come up in a row. This is just a little...
Parents do strange things for their kids. Why else would we sing 87 verses of the wheels of the bus? We do them out of love, or guilt, procrastination, or boredom. Today’s Christmas for many of us around the world. A day some parents flash the cash t...
Hey ,How often do you stop? Not sit and veg in front of the TV, or kill a few hours and a thousand bad guys on a games console, but actually stop. Like letting a square of chocolate melt across your tongue while giving it your complete attention, wit...
When did you learn about death? I remember it being taught as a near joyful event where loved ones went to a perfect heaven. That we should be happy, but never were. I’m so insulated from death I can go months without a reminder. Meat comes pre-packa...