Right then lovely people. Picture this. You spend months, even years, making something. You sit at the desk when you’re tired, stay up late. Every day for absolutely ages, you obsess about the story and the words in your head. You cut and reshape and doubt yourself and carry on anyway. Eventually, after all the drafting, redrafting, dead ends and new starts, and editing and second guessing, it’s time to search up agents or publishers, magazines, opportunities that would suit.

The hidden work that matters more than you think People talk about editing as if it’s a final tidy-up. A wee polish before something goes out into the world. That’s not editing. Nor is it proofreading, for that matter. If you’ve ever had a piece properly edited, you’ll know it can feel a bit exposing. You send something off thinking it’s nearly there, and it comes back with questions you didn’t expect. Not huge, dramatic rewrites. Smaller things. Why this line. Why this order

Chums, all my chairs are in disarray. I’ve spent the last few blog posts talking about rooms, about counting chairs at launches, about who fills them and what that means. At the moment, I couldn’t tell you where half of mine are. They’ve been dragged into the garden, repurposed for makeshift dens, covered in snack crumbs, or abandoned halfway through some elaborate game that made perfect sense at the time. I’ve just had three weeks off. School holidays. Two children, ten and

Alright then, good people reading my blog. I’m back with my chairs. Yep, I’ve looked up from counting chairs and realised: I know most of the room. I think I was circling this last week when I spoke about 150 copies being a success. I mean it though: I know most of the crowd. Not in that vague way where faces feel familiar, but properly. Shared a stage with one, edited another, had a drink with three of them, promised to send an email to someone at the back and quietly forgot

Why the slow burn matters more than the sell-out launch in small press publishing. Success is a slippery thing in indie publishing. If you ask a large publisher what success looks like, the answer is usually straightforward. Full market coverage from independent bookshops to online via the chains and the supermarkets. Copies sold and rights deals. Reviews in the big papers and celeb or two mentioning it on their podcast. A prize if everything aligns. There are numbers that ca

And Why They Matter Last week, in my post about poetry pamphlets, I mentioned standing at the back of launches counting chairs. I wasn’t being metaphorical. It’s real life. And maths. Not quite the maths I expected to be using when a teacher once promised I’d “need this later.” Thirty chairs out. Sixteen filled. A quick, silent debate about whether to remove the back row so the gaps don’t glare. Two people text to say they’re “just parking.” A group pauses at the door. Are th

I unapologetically love poetry pamphlets. Not because they’re small and therefore quaint. They aren’t inconsequential filler, nor half-hearted small fry knocked out to plug a gap in the schedule. For many independent presses, pamphlets are the lifeblood. They keep the conversation moving, allow new voices in. They create momentum. There isn’t much money in them. That’s the honest truth. A pamphlet costs almost as much to produce as a full collection once you factor in editing

People often ask me how to edit a poem. Usually in a slightly panicked way. As if editing poetry is a dark art that only reveals itself after years of suffering. I get it. Writing the poem is one thing. Editing it is another entirely. I’m a published poet and I edit poetry through Stewed Rhubarb Press. I read a lot of poems. I talk about poems all the time. And yet, despite all that, I still do every single thing I’m about to mention in my own drafts. My own editor will happi

I sometimes think that being a writer requires the patience of a bonsai enthusiast, the endurance of past runrig crofters, and the optimism of someone who plants a seed and fully believes it will become a oak by Tuesday. let’s face it, the amount of happy seedlings my kids have brought home through Primary school only for me to enthusiastically over water them or neglectfully forget to water them again. I failed every sunflower. Feral the Elder’s strawberries live only becaus

Almost every day, I walk my lovely labradoodle, Fidra, along the canal near where I live. It’s an ordinary enough route: down the path behind the house, down the hill, over the bridge, and onto the familiar stretch of towpath that curves like a thought I’ve traced a thousand times. But it’s never the same walk. The seasons keep rewriting it. In late summer, the light grows thick and golden, dripping through the trees like syrup poured from a jug. Soon it will be winter, the w

✏️ Between Worlds I moved from Spain to the UK two days before my eighteenth birthday, carrying a big old red suitcase and a brown canvas shoulder bag. Inside: about twenty cassette tapes, a book, and not much else. I’d forgotten to pack a towel, so the first thing I bought was a soft blue one that cost more than it should have. I remember feeling very proud of it, and then, almost immediately, very homesick. Like my notebooks from back then, I still have it, in all its old t

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