The obvious thing is to read, look, listen, but you already know that, so do you want to have some fun? Try leaving the house as a spy. I’m serious. Spying is not just listening and watching. It’s espionage, which places one in an entirely different frame of mind, where…

“An artist’s job is to articulate what might otherwise be incoherent.” Nancy Spero My love affair with the artist Nancy Spero is recent and on point with my psychological, therefore artistic, development. Recently, I’ve begun experimenting with imagery alongside text because I’ve found that increasingly the topics I want to…

Read. Read. Read. I choose three books to study after completing the first draft. One that’s similar in genre and plot, another that’s similar in tone, and a third that is completely different, but linked by a particular subject. For instance, I read A Convergence of Birds by Jonathan Safran…

Today is International Women’s Day. It is also the day that children in the UK are able to go back into school after, roughly, a year in lockdown home-schooling. I don’t think it’s a wild stretch to say that women have felt the brunt of life in lockdown more than…

Occasionally, I am asked why I run Backlash Press. It’s a fair question and, truth be told, one that I have wondered myself sometimes! We all have those days, right? I mean, it’s a lot of work for little pay. I’m a writer who seldom, ironically, has the opportunity to…

Our society has a way of silencing the truth tellers. It often places them inside a derisive narrative comprised of motivations severed from human actuality, until an event happens that causes a moral explosion, and a revolution is born. The story reads like this: oppression, demoralization, explosion, revolt, then a…

It may seem counterintuitive, but the best way to see something is from a distance. This is because intense concentration can narrow our view and lead to inattentional blindness. As a writer, I prize concentration, but it’s worthwhile considering how our attentive minds are built for distraction. As hunters and…

A Helpful Five Minutes Top writing tips from an independent publisher. 1. It’s a bit of a no-brainer, though needs to be reinforced — it’s collaborative of people who would otherwise work alone. You need to get out of your writerly silo and talk to other creatives. Often, I’ve found…

Here are some things you should consider before you choose and why. I have a lot of experience in this area. I’m the Editor-in-Chief of Backlash Press, an independent publishing house, that has, over the years, published the work of many in every conceivable format: traditional, self-publication, journal, arthouse, limited…