Writing

5 min readThirty Days of Writing

Where to write your 50,000 words. The organisation behind the original month-long challenge closed in 2025; the month did not. What is running this November, how the options differ, and how to pick one.

5 min readThirty Days of Writing

The most common way to win a month-long novel challenge and still not have a novel. One decision prevents it, and it takes one evening.

5 min readThirty Days of Writing

Not an outline. One ending, three turns and about forty lines — two sides of a sheet of paper, one evening, and enough to stop you getting lost on Day 9.

4 min readThirty Days of Writing

Nobody quits a month-long novel because they fell behind. They quit because of the plan they made for catching up. Here is a better one, and it is mostly division.

5 min readThirty Days of Writing

Not a lack of willpower and not a bad idea. The second-week wall is made of three separate things, it arrives on schedule, and each part has its own fix.

5 min readThirty Days of Writing

Around Day 6 you will read back a paragraph and feel it sink. That feeling is real, it is useful, and it is on a schedule. It is also the most common way a month-long novel becomes one very good chapter.

5 min readThe Rewrite

The month teaches you to draft. The months after decide whether you end up with a novel. Here is what to do in December — starting with nothing at all.

7 min readThe Four-Day Novel

The model is not being lazy, and it is not broken. It is doing exactly the thing it was built to do — and that is the problem you have to solve.

6 min readHow to Write Upmarket Fiction

Every definition says the same thing — literary quality, commercial appeal. None of them tells you what to do. Here is the mechanism underneath the mood.

4 min readHow to Write Speculative Fiction

"Anything that isn't realism" is accurate and useless at the desk. It tells you what your book isn't. Here is a definition you can actually build with.

6 min readThe Four-Day Novel

Yes. The rule is not the one most writers think it is, and the dangerous position is not the one they are worried about.

4 min readHow to Write Upmarket Fiction

Three categories, one grid, and a test that takes ten minutes. Most manuscripts are not where their author thinks they are.

6 min readThe Four-Day Novel

They are not lie detectors. They are smoothness detectors, which is why clean, fast human prose keeps getting convicted.

4 min readHow to Write Speculative Fiction

When a speculative novel feels underbuilt, the instinct is to add. A second magic system, another faction, more history. It is almost always the wrong move.

8 min readThe Four-Day Novel

The step almost everyone skips, and the one doing most of the work. It takes an evening, and nothing downstream sounds like you without it.

4 min readHow to Write Upmarket Fiction

Everyone praises the writing. Nobody can put the book down and nobody can pick it up either. The problem is almost never the sentences — it is where you spent them.

8 min readThe Four-Day Novel

Around chapter fourteen the housekeeper's name quietly changes. Here is the document that prevents it, and why it is not world-building homework.

4 min readHow to Write Upmarket Fiction

The last forty pages work beautifully. Everything comes together. And the thing people were going to argue about quietly disappears.