I should have known something was wrong when I was starting my days by crying in the shower. But I didn’t. I’d swallowed the hustle culture mentality and toxic vibes of the 2010’s hook, line and sinker.

Crying in the shower was just part of the game, right? It couldn’t possibly be a symptom of something more.

And anyway, I hadn’t always cried in the shower. I loved my company, I loved what I was doing, didn’t I? So why was I relieved when we closed the door?

But that’s the end. In order to understand it all I need to take you back to the beginning.

That’s me! Sophie. In front of our first ever inventory!

I was twenty-three and had somehow convinced my mum to start a business with me. Something I’d been nagging her about for three years.

After I’d gone to her with a business plan and convinced her to invest, I’d spent the next year working on the company, the product, speaking to as many people as I could, learning as much as I could and in general just absorbing the girlboss vibes of the 2010’s. Sophia Amoruso’s book was proudly displayed on my shelf and I was CONVINCED I was going to be the next big thing.

When we landed Angel Investment I made the decision to put my final year of uni on hold, the plan had always been to go back — I was going to be THAT drop out.

I was not that drop out. I did not go back. But I’d like to.

Launching KINN was a fever dream. We had hired the most amazing PR company to work with, stayed overnight at the Sanderson (I’m a sucker for anything Philippe Starck designed) and the morning we pressed go on our website we got the grand sum of… three sales. My husband (boyfriend at the time), step-dad and my grandma.

Still, it was exciting. We spoke to press, got to introduce our products to bloggers and influencers and at the end of the day… how many twenty-three year olds could say they had an actual live business!

What is KINN you ask?

It was a dream. Simple, natural, organic and eco-friendly body care and home products based on aromatherapy.

While at Uni I would often pop into Planet Organic (I was raised by a crunchy mum, don’t judge me lol) and peruse the shelves looking for healthy snacks and kombucha, and it was as I was picking up a chocolate mousse made with avocado (it’s amazing by the way) that it dawned on me. We’re looking after what we put on our skin, what we put in our bodies… but we aren’t looking after the things we clean our homes with!

From there I went down a rabbit hole, researching the effects conventional cleaning products have on us (they’re awful) and trying to find alternatives that weren’t greenwashing the shit out of themselves or weren’t ugly.

In 2010, someone invented the idea that sleep was for people with small dreams.

I’m being glib. But only slightly. The culture that defined that era — and by era I mean the explosion of Millennial Optimism, blogging and instagram vibes… roughly 2008 to 2020 — had a very specific theology.

Work was to worship. Rest was weakness. Ambition was the only personality trait worth having, and the correct way to demonstrate it was to be visibly, performatively exhausted at all times. If you weren’t nauseatingly obnoxious about it— you were doing it wrong. If you weren’t at every conference, reading every (let’s face it, mostly useless) self-development book you were an absolute disgrace. If you weren’t chugging coffee, sleep deprived but dressed like you were ready for a fashion blog post you had failed.

It was called “The Hustle” the vibes were “Girlboss.” It was on tote bags. It was on our vision boards, every aspect of our personalities (and by our, I mean those of us who swallowed this rhetoric without a seconds hesitation) were shaped by the vibe — by the mantra “but mum, I am a rich CEO.”

I joined the ranks of a particular generation of millennial women who had been told loudly and repeatedly, that we could have it all as long as we worked hard enough for it — never mind the multi “once in a generation” crisis we were living through — and apparently continue to live through. I lapped it up. I was going to be a STAR! Fuck my writing, fuck my actual dreams. Fuck it all, I’m going to be on FORBES! Because if I’m not on Forbes why was I even bothering… to save the planet? I wanted to save the planet, I wanted to have products that didn’t have animal fat in them — let alone test on them, but I won’t pretend there wasn’t a level of complete delusion and vapid desire to be seen to be see successful.

I want to be honest about something. I never actually enjoyed the hustle. Not really. KINN was — and still is — something I truly believe in. I hate animal testing, I don’t understand why the hell there’s animal fat in laundry products and aromatherapy has been a part of my life since day one (my great uncle is one of the founding fathers of modern aromatherapy). The problem I was helping to solve, the products we were developing, the space we were helping to create was genuinely fun. I enjoyed that.

But the hustle around it — the performance of relentless drive, the particular brand of exhaustion that came with having five million thoughts all at once while wearing twenty different hats because having a start-up means doing everything. That part I performed. Convincingly, I think. Certainly convincingly enough to fool myself.

I suspect, looking back with the clarity that only hindsight and a great deal of therapy-adjacent journaling provides, that I have undiagnosed ADHD (I will one of these days go and get tested… I just haven’t organised myself to do it).

I say this not as a digression, but as something central to the story : because from what I understand of what ADHD does, particularly in women who have spent their lives compensating for it, is make you extraordinarily good at performing neurotypical productivity while finding the actual experience of it absolutely exhausting.

And I found it exhausting. I felt like I was sprinting on a treadmill that everyone else was walking on. And when I finally get to step off for a second, when whatever task I was doing was complete I don’t feel elation — I don’t feel anything at all really, aside from the acute sense of relief that that task is finally.fucking.finished.

I never knew that that’s a sign of something. Apparently if you can look put together they just let you raw dog life.

The culture that shaped my twenties had two patron saints, and I had complicated feelings about both of them.

The first was Sophia Amoruso — #GIRLBOSS, the woman who built NastyGal from an eBay store and wrote a book about it that made hustle sound not just aspirational but frankly thrilling. I had the book, I loved the book. The quirky millennial pink cover with an astronauts helmet even made it into our first ever product shoot, because after all when you’re creating flat-lays it has to be “aspirational”.

The second was Sheryl Sandberg, who told us to “Lean In.” I have more feelings about Lean In than I have space to fully express here, but I think Diabolical Lies also does a good deep dive on it, I encourage you to go and listen to their podcast.

I was, in my defence, an extremely willing convert. After all, who didn’t want to be anything as trite — and quite frankly condescending — as a SHEO. I honestly hate that phrase… right alongside mumpreneur. As if women’s ambitions and achievements have to be watered down and made soggy with these trite and stupid little titles. Look they even do it to writers… a woman writes an epic fantasy and it’s “Romantasy” never mind that the book she wrote doesn’t fit the damn genre and leaves readers scratching their heads after they’ve crawled through five hundred pages of nightmare fuel and one kiss. Anyway…

All throughout my school years I had been fed the narrative that if we didn’t work our hardest, if we didn’t step up and claim the space women had carved for us — that our lives would essentially be meaningless. It was a lesson absorbed so early and completely that I genuinely couldn’t have told you where it came from.

It was simply true, the way gravity is true. I didn’t question it. I didn’t question being told to “lean in” or “take up space” by powerful women who — incidentally — had an army of staff to hep them do just that. While the rest of us were left treading water, running our lives, businesses, careers out of what is essentially willpower, caffeine and spreadsheets. We were told we simply mismanaged the “same hours” a day that everyone else has. Because nothing screams helping women like gaslighting them into thinking we weren’t already doing enough.

There were lots of “kickass” women out there giving ted-talks about waking up at 5am to lock the fuck in, or whatever… on the assumption that there was a support infrastructure that most of us did not/do not have and were too proud to admit we needed. Sheryl even references this.

One thing I realised, looking back on it all — was that the hustle era didn’t ask us to succeed. It asked us to perform succeeding, at all times, regardless of what was actually happening underneath.

I felt like a swan, gliding serenely across the surface while my little feet kicked manically below the surface.

Somewhere along the way I stopped believing in my goal of being a writer, for some strange reason I put it on the back shelf. I told my self I had to be a real woman first, I had to take up space, I had to have a business and then… only then, once I’d made stupid amounts of money could I sit back and be a writer… wtf. I don’t even understand where that mentality came from. Maybe from the derision artists face by miserable old cunts who let their dreams go and hate to see us chase ours…

By my mid-to-late-twenties I had my own company, Venture Capital investors (I’d even managed to raise an offer of £1 million, which fell through in the end because the FMCG company they invested in before us went bankrupt on the Friday and we were meant to get the contract on the Monday… shit timing). I had perfected the particular brand of exhaustion that passes for passion.

I was also, I should say, genuinely excited. The natural cleaning and laundry market was about to become the thing everyone wanted, and I had arrived there early — a fact that felt like confirmation of everything I believed about work and reward. You make your own luck or hard work puts you where the good luck can find you — a truly insufferable set of mantras I had adopted.

I remember — to this day — having meetings with idiots who laughed at the idea of natural cleaning products. Well look who is laughing now!!!!! Not me, because my company went under, but those who survived certainly are.

What I remember most about those years — the fundraising, networking, trade shows, manufacturer visits, retail listing, the press, the “being-on-a-list”— is not the excitement, though there was excitement. It was the silence around the parts that aren’t working. The way we all moved through the same world, struggling with versions of the same things, and said absolutely nothing about it to each other.

I was added to a group chat of some EXTREMELY successful women, women I could only hope to one day be like. And I remember the deafening silence when someone announced they had closed their business. Or the way everyone quickly swept the conversation under the rug if someone was struggling. Sure, conversations might have happened outside of that group chat. But it was there for one thing only — a vapid vacuum of LinkedIn style posts where we would pat ourselves on the back and gush enthusiastically for anyone else exuding success. We discussed strategies, productivity, growth, marketing — all very, very useful things. But we never discussed what happens if it doesn’t work.

We never discussed what it felt like to wake up at 3am filled with an overwhelming sense of dread and panic. Or the anxiety that had become so baseline we’d stopped noticing it. The growing, guilty suspicion that we were not, in fact, fine — and that admitting it would somehow disqualify us from the whole endeavour.

I remember one particular day when a squabble broke out about sitting in business class versus economy when building our “empires.” This group chat was truly — at times — vapid.

Looking back with the grace that times allows I realise now that what was happening is simple. We had no bandwidth for anyone else’s struggle, because we were using everything we had to manage our own. And we were managing it alone. Getting therapy and discussing mental health was not — at that point in time — the done thing. I have since left said group chat… I truly couldn’t take it any more.

What I didn’t understand then, and what I spent the next few years of my life after KINN and all the hopes and dreams I’d placed on it came tumbling down — was unpicking the difference between working hard because I love what I’m doing and working hard because I confused output with worth.

They feel identical from the inside. But one of them will break you. Because here is what hustle culture was actually selling us, underneath the tote bags, the perfect girl boss mornings and the relentless forward motion :

It was selling exhaustion dressed up as passion. It was selling anxiety dressed up as ambition. It was handing over a set of feelings that were, at root, fear — fear of not being enough, fear of falling behind, fear of the thing I might find if I stopped moving long enough to look, fear I was a terrible excuse of a modern day woman — and it was telling me those feelings were drive.

I believed it. Because the feelings were real, and the re-framing was convincing, and there was nobody around saying : wait. Stop! That thing you’re calling passion? I think it might be panic.

The difference between passion and panic, it turns out, is quite important. Passion is sustainable. It has roots. It can survive a slow day, a setback, an afternoon off. Panic is just adrenaline with better branding. It runs on fumes and it burns you out and it disguises itself as productivity right up until the moment it doesn’t.

I am passionate about writing. I always have been. I could do it on no sleep, I could do it after the worst events of my life. I did it to get through the worst moment of my life. Writing is at the very core of me. Which is probably why I’m such a sanctimonious, AI hating dickhead. I can’t fathom why anyone would hand over something so pure as creativity to a fucking LLM and then have the audacity to claim the work is theirs. Sorry. I can’t.

Anyway. I digress.

I was running on panic for years. I thought it was passion because it felt so urgent. Because the urgency felt like caring. Because I genuinely did care — about the business, about our wonderful customers, about the work — I grew up being considered weird because my mum was a crunchy mum who cared about the things we ate and the things we put on our skin… let alone the sorry state of the planet. Pocahontas and Fern Gully were some of my favourite films. The line “you can own the earth and still, all you’ll own is earth until you can paint with all the colours of the wind.” sends shivers down my spine. I don’t know how anyone growing up a millenial could watch these films and not feel a deep rooted passion for this planet and the animals within it… anyway…

I cared about the thing I was building.

But caring about something and being unable to stop regardless of the cost are not the same thing. That distinction took me a long time to learn.

Anyway. That’s enough rambling for today. Make sure to subscribe so you can read the next instalment.

But. The question I want to leave you with —

How much of what you called ambition was genuinely yours? And how much was assembled from what ambition is supposed to look like, handed to you by a culture that needed you to keep moving and never really asked whether the destination was one you’d chosen, or the pre-ordained capitalist playbook of relentless consumption?

Ps if you know any agents who want to help me tell this story in print format… hmu ;)

Don’t be afraid to let it be shit.

Is what I whisper to myself as I sit down to start the second book of The Crimson Chronicles in my vampire Mafia series.

Easier said than done — whispers the bitch in the back of my brain who likes to stir shit up.

I don’t know what it is about starting the second book in a series that has me utterly crippled. I’ve just written 100k+ words, fine tuned them, cut them, butchered them, re-written them, deleted them, saved them, put them back — I’ve organised an entire made up world and a whole cast of non-existent people into a semblance of a story I’m proud off and now— now that it’s time for me to continue said story I come up blank.

Nothing.

Nada.

Not a thing.

I stare at the blank page and the blinking cursor and I wonder why on earth I can’t seem to write stand-alone novels. Why I decided to make the world so big it will take me an age to tie up all the loose ends.

I’ve got spin-offs and side quests… oh those are easy, but when I have to feed a whole new beast I close my laptop and pretend it’s not happening.

Book 2 can’t hurt me if I don’t look at it.

I think part of the problem is that I’m obviously comparing a fresh draft to a finished piece of work. I’ve spent so long fine tuning my baby that I forgot it was, at one point — completely shit.

When I first started writing INHERITANCE I thought it was going to be short and sweet, a quick vampire mafia romance about a girl looking to get her throne back… apparently my characters had other plans in mind.

This is why I don’t tend to write a concrete plot before I have the first draft in my hands, because I change it so often throughout the process that I often don’t have anything resembling the first iteration I sat down with. (I envy those who can envisage every chapter before they even get going!)

Case in point with INHERITANCE, Xavier comes from a dystopian novel I wrote over ten years ago, a few scenes come out of an entirely different vampire gothic novel that revolved human experimentation I scratched because I’m just not dark enough to write that… yet, and the bad guys— they where only fully fleshed out during my second draft.

So why — oh why, am I letting myself be terrorised by the first draft jitters. Why am I so scared to just put my fingers to the keys and type? I know I don’t need it to be perfect. I don’t even need it to make sense.

I have this horrible habit of editing and re-reading as I go, which I think slows me down. It’s something I’m actively working to stop doing, and so far it’s helped me. I have a horrendous first draft for the second book of my fantasy series… but guess what, it’s 50k words in which is better than 1 word and crippling anxiety and writers block I have developed for book 2 of The Crimson Chronicles.

One thing I’ve realised helps me massively when this happens is to simply step away.

I close my laptop and I try not to think about the book at all. I go for walks, I play with my dog, I read books I’ve been meaning to finish, catch up on shows. I do my absolute best to not think about it until the ideas start pounding at the edges of my skull begging me to put them onto paper.

And then — I do just that, I write them onto paper, or into my notes app. I scribble scenes, snippets of conversations, moments that might be only two or three lines long. I let the story ferment, I let the ideas breathe.

When I feel like I’ve got enough notes I open the document again and this is the trick I use that always gets me going — I paste the last ten thousands words into my new document and I pretend I’m just continuing the old book.

It’s simple, but strangely effective. Because for some reason writing Chapter 52 is easier than writing Chapter 1. When I’ve written a good chunk I delete the ten thousand words from the previous book — otherwise I’ll start to compare their polished prose to the complete dumpster fire I’m typing out.

Because the thing is, the first draft isn’t good — yet. But that doesn’t mean it won’t be good. And it’s something I have to remind myself from time to time. I can’t compare my day one to day one hundred (day one hundred is a bit of an understatement for the amount of time it takes…). I can’t compare my unfinished series to a polished and published one.

It’s so easy to get caught up in thinking about all the things we have to do, the hopes we have for our novels, the future of the books. I often talk to myself in the car as if I were being interviewed, I get so hyped up and then the car ride ends — I’m at my end destination, which is to buy dog food or a lemon and I have to drag myself back into reality. I have to remind myself if I want to talk to people about my books… I actually have to, you know — write them.

I have to stop always looking at the whole picture, otherwise I’ll forget to paint it.

It’s a marathon to write a book, a not a sprint.

Do you have any tips for pushing through first draft nerves?

Where to begin! This is probably a bit TMI but whatever… :)

First of all, I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who has joined me on this journey.

Last year I went through one of the most traumatic experiences of my life, my therapist suggested I take my writing seriously, find something to focus on that would ignite my soul again. I will be forever grateful for her encouragement and her approach to grief.

I started writing seriously.

I looked at my old work, tore apart novels and plundered characters from my anthology of dead works. I wrote a Romantasy draft, an epic fantasy draft and this year I went back to one of my old loves… vampires and mafia. One of my old dystopian works yielded Xavier. The MMC of INHERITANCE, from there the world was born. Céline came into my mind and the rest as they say — is history.

A few months, after being battered in the query trenches with — admittedly, a shitty draft of my fantasy — I made the decision I would stop waiting for someone to make my dreams happen and would self-publish my debut novel.

I joined substack because I was having an absolute mental breakdown on instagram. Like full on menty-b and I needed to find a place where there were people who actually want to cheer one another on, who wanted to be excited for other people.

I LOVE being excited for other people, cheering on my friends, strangers, people I’ve worked with gives me so much joy. I never expected to find a community who would cheer me on.

And yet, here I am, I found my people. Eight year old me writing furious fan-fiction over Escaflowne could have never imagined it.

INHERITANCE is in part my love letter to London and my twenties, a love letter to the time I spent young and dumb running around London falling out of members clubs and stalking ballrooms. (Yeah… I had some fun!)

It’s an ode to my obsession with the mafia, my mum handed me a copy of The Godfather in my teenage years and I never looked back — thought it was The Family that really got me hooked. My dad sat me down and introduced to me Lock Stock and SNATCH. I am a DIE HARD Guy Ritchie fan.

It’s my FUCK YOU to the fascists and people who would try to tear us apart, and it’s a romance — because at the centre of it all, LOVE. Love is the thing that keeps this crazy beautiful world spinning, that brings people together to fight for what’s good, and what’s right and what’s worth saving.

It all sounds a little grandiose for what is essentially my slutty little vampires running around the continent doing horrible things to one another and worse things to fascists, but there it is.

Writing is at the core of my soul. I truly believe I was put on this earth and given all my weird hyper-fixations to write. I’m certain a lot of you feel the same.

So without further preamble, I humbly introduce you to INHERITANCE.

Cover coming soon!

Céline Ravenscroft wants one thing — Xavier de Montreval, dead. But when her best friend goes missing and she’s forced to turn to him for help, Céline discovers the bodies piling up across London – human and vampire — have nothing to do with the man she came to kill. And everything to do with the night her father died.

Pulled deeper into his world, she realises the fractured, brilliant and brutal playboy is nothing like the reputation he’s spent a lifetime performing. As the bodies pile up, and a fanatical anti-vampire cult comes into focus, Céline must decide how much of her old life she’s willing to burn down to take back what’s hers.

The decision came pretty much overnight. Though it had probably been brewing in the back of my mind far longer than that.

I had just been rejected on a fantasy I’d poured my heart and soul in to — a rejection that was at least not form… and I’d picked up a traditionally published book which I thought — for want of a better word — was shit (yes, yes tastes varies, and I’m sure some people will think my work is shit, I don’t mind that).

And it was as I sat there, incredibly bitter with a book I couldn’t wrap my head around having ever been published — and went down a spiral of self-doubt and negativity that I decided to pick up my phone and scroll back through my photos until I reached the delulu days of my early twenties.

As I looked at that happy, care free version of myself who thought taking on conglomerates like Unilever was a cake walk I realised something… delulu is the only solulu.

I had an epiphany, publishing is ultimately a market place. It’s a business, and the only way to be in business is to partake in said business activities. Now, I could either sit around and wait for someone to hold my hand and do it with me, or I could start the journey on my own — and pray to God someone joins me along the way.

I started to research what it actually takes to be a published author, what is expected from you if you do sign the magical contract that gets you through the door of an agency and then — maybe, just maybe… because a lot of books die on submission — into a punishing publishing house.

What became achingly clear was that you have to compromise… a lot. Everyone wants to leave their stamp on your book, and you loose creative control of the cover, the title — heck even the story if you’re not strong willed enough. There’s a reason there are so many A Court of Cookie Cutters with weird children as protagonists acting like grown women… you can’t market it as a crossover if she’s over twenty-five.

Then there’s the kicker — once you’ve had to hack your book down to fit some arbitrary formula the accountants have decided yields the highest return — you still have to market it yourself. I was SHOCKED but I suppose not entirely surprised that as an author with a trad publishing deal that not only will you have to continue building your own platform, marketing your own book, paying for your own press, booking your own podcasts, organising your own meet and greets, paying for your own artwork etc etc… you’ll also have to hand over the lions share of the earnings from your book for the privilege as well a rights etc unless you have a Tiger Mum for an agent who will fight your corner bare knuckle.

Of course, if you’re one of the big names raking in the money, they’ll just throw everything they have at you. I’m not surprised by that little fact at all, after all publishing is a business and businesses will invest in what’s working.

The thing is, of course what’s working will work when you’re paying gigantic sums to saturate the market with the product.

This was — and still is — a tactic used by a lot of start-ups and companies, move fast and break things. Spend enormous sums on marketing and worry about the ROI at a later date. It doesn’t matter if your customer acquisition cost is astronomical providing you can claim that the your future returns will be a multiplier of X or can convince someone else to pay for it.

Why do you think so many special limited editions are being pumped out and placed by the entrance of every book store? It’s a similar tactic supermarkets and department stores use when you enter their shop — it’s not a cheap table to be on, but it’s worth it if you can get there.

Sitting back and cogitating on all that I learnt through my years of running a start-up that landed me on Forbes 30U30, got me into meetings with LVMH and Unilever Ventures and my products on the shelves of Harrods and Waitrose I realised that a lot of what comes after I’ve written the book is the same as what came after I made my products. It’s sales, it’s marketing, it’s having the grit and tenacity to keep going when everyone tells you you’re a raving idiot and your product will never work.

I decided that whilst my ultimate dream is to be traditionally published one day, and I REALLY want to find the Tiger Mum agent of my dreams who I can work with long-term, I’m not going to achieve any of that sitting on my arse praying I don’t get swallowed up by the query trenches.

Listening to Callie Hart talk about the years she put in, the fact Quicksilver came to her during a time when she was really burnt out by the whole process struck a chord with me. I’d been praying for an overnight success when what I needed to do was just get going. Motion creates motion. Nothing exists in a vacuum and if I want to have any control over my creative output in the future I need to build an audience that is mine, and not by publishing houses.

I need to embrace the cringey reality that if I want to talk to people about my books, if I want to find readers out there who will crush over my fictional characters with me, will weep with me, will be willing to turn up and chat with me about this silly little worlds I build, I have to find them. They will not find me behind my laptop.

My mum has this fantastic ability to just ask for things. She truly believes that if you “don’t ask you won’t get” and she isn’t scared of being told no. After a year of being knocked back in the query trenches with form rejections and rejections that told me my writing was great and they loved the story but its a no for them, I realised I was narrowing myself down because I was scared of the wider rejections I might face. What if the audience says no.

Well, that’s inevitable. There will be people out there who HATE my books, HATE my writing style and probably will HATE me… I had one comment on a double page feature I had comment on the fact I have a double barrelled surname like it was akin to being a fucking monster… apparently two surnames is very bourgeoisie and means I shouldn’t be allowed to try and do things. Go figure.

Anyway. All this rambling to say that I came to the conclusion to self-publish because if I’m going to be asked to do absolutely everything anyway, I might as well start now. I’m not writing because I want to be part of a fast fashion mill of shit books that run like a pump and dump scheme, I’m writing because if I don’t write I will probably loose my mind. I write because story telling has been in my bones since day one. I write because I need somewhere to put my thoughts, my feelings, my trauma, my joy and I write because I love to read and I LOVE to talk to other people about books and one day… one day I might get to talk to someone about my book and I think that’s really cool.

Maybe it will work out — Maybe it won’t. Statistically it won’t. But I’ve dealt with those statistics before and the fallout of everything crumbling down around you. I survived the death of my business (thanks COVID, thanks Brexit — thanks VC fund for not giving us the rest of our money!), and I’ll survive the hard slog of self-publishing.

I’ll start by caveatting I really enjoy reading Romantasy — true my tastes when I am writing lean a little more towards the tragic side of things, but tell me, is there anything better than opening a book and getting lost into the sweeping — often nonsensical world — of a Romantasy? I’ll wait.

However there are some tropes that the second they rear their ugly heads I’m eye rolling before I’ve even made it to the end of the sentence. Take this with a pinch of salt, it’s tongue-in-cheek and heaped full of hypocrisy as I too explore a lot of these mind-numbing but oh so fun to write tropes.

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She’s not like other girls — and she’s not even twenty.

Let’s take the obvious one — she’s a teenager… but you know, mature for her age or some shit. She’s apparently been starving to death well before she reached puberty (one would assume this has also stunted her growth… apparently not), her education comes from the streets — or the mines, or whatever shitty ass situation she was in, and she is also as strong as an ox (despite the aforementioned starvation) and is — for whatever inconceivable notion the only person an immortal man will fall in love with. What.The.Fuck?

I think this is done on purpose, not because grown ass women like reading about teenagers being groomed by falling in love with older men, but because that way it can be marketed as a crossover. I will not pretend I do not read these books, I just age them up in my head — if she walks like a twenty-five+ year old woman, talks like a twenty-five+ year old woman and fucks like a twenty-five+ year old woman she is… in my mind, at least over twenty-five. I DO NOT MIND age gaps by the way (my husband is seven years older than me), I write them myself, the closest in age characters I have are still five years apart, the largest a good two hundred, I just cannot pretend that a teenager in these very grown up worlds is anyhow of interest unless it’s a truly YA novel. Then I LAP their characters up, I love YA!

She’s obviously more capable than anyone else — ever.

On the topic of teenage women — girls — being the only thing bringing an old man to his knees… as if we can’t figure out why. Why, for the love of all that is holy, are they — in the space of a month, maybe six — suddenly leaders of armies that have been training for centuries.

I’m sorry, hungry illiterate child, but sit the fuck down and learn.

They don’t learn, they don’t posses any intellectual curiosity whatsoever, they show no interest in what it takes to be a statesman, they’re just somehow — from the depths of their starved soul — born ready to lead.

Maybe it’s my love of history, but when you know how much goes into raising a person to be an absolute monarch or lead an army, take the cloth — whatever — you start to question the capabilities of those who would hand their futures over to a literal child. Like cool — immortal man, you enjoy your new bride — but we’d rather not have you make strategic fucking life and death decisions based on their whims.

The best characters are the ones developed past something other than snarky eye candy. I have NO issue in them becoming leaders, in them picking up the mantle and doing incredible things. Joan of Arc exists and she was practically a baby. But where is the self-development past the obsessing over the self. Because yes, they over come some personal internal problem and apparently that’s enough for their latent leadership abilities to come streaming out of them, but they rarely if ever do something that develops them into a role worthy of leading. And when a writer finally does it — everyone hates the character because she’s apparently a massive bitch who doesn’t deserve redemption, despite putting in so much goddamn work the only thing left to her is to prostrate herself at the feet of those she has wronged and self-flagellate. LOVE YOU NESTA BABY GIRL.

I digress — the teenager who is obviously not a teenager but is for whatever inexpiable reason a teenager trope needs to die.

Sexy, brooding Shadow Daddy, what have you been doing all of these years?

Now — the men. I am a sucker for an OLD ASS SHADOW DADDY’S (Kingfisher… I will worship on my knees, ‘nuff said.). I just need these men to exist outside the realms of being the tortured love interest of the aforementioned teenager.

I need a messy past not just a tragic one, I need to know there’s a reason he can find the clit. I need to understand why he’s not been married or had a long term relationship. He’s been on the planet for a long time and I am not BUYING that he doesn’t have a history and has just been sitting around waiting for said teenager to waltz into his life and dazzle him with her sparkling personality.

I need them to also have a backbone. Yes, yes, they are strong and brooding and swoon worthy. They are often Princes, leaders of a rebellion etc and yet they also don’t really show much in the way of strategic thinking and very weirdly hand their power over to someone who is woefully ill-equipped for the complexity of running a campaign, smashing an empire or colonising (lets face it, some of these people are colonisers— even if they’re driving out the “bad” guy).

I do not buy that this incredibly sexy (always very straight… show me some queerness, immortality is a long time, why not try both?) hunk who has been groomed since birth to lead will not continue to lead. They might invite the partner alongside them, but like no — they’d expect at least some self-study on the topics at hand before they’re turning to them and saying — here’s an insanely complex multidimensional game of chess that involves actual lives, please opine on what you would do next despite having just been scrapped out of whatever hovel I found you in six weeks ago.

At this point in the article you might be thinking — it’s not that deep, please stop shitting on Romantasy. I agree with you, it’s not that deep — I will continue to lap these tropes and the books up, for me — they are some of the most enjoyable books out there and I truly admire anyone who is able to sit down and write a book, even if said book is not for me ( I really can’t stand people who leave whole ass essays explaining why an author sucks and their books sucks — maybe you just didn’t like the book, move on). But I will also continue to have thoughts on them because I just can’t, and the internet is a place where I can shit-post in peace.

Why is it always a Shadow Daddy?

Ok, so I am GUILTY as charged with this one, I have an obsession with writing female characters on the edge of power but not necessarily the centre of it — that’s not to say that some don’t step into the centre of the storm… but I digress. I like to explore why the hell they stay, so yes… there are a lot of Shadow Daddy’s in my own work. But I must admit — when I’m reading, I would LOVE to come across a Shadow Mummy. I want a woman who is old af and can hold her own and is like… oh look at this nice young, illiterate starving man, let me drag him from obscurity and show him a world beyond his imagination. I am sure these books are out there, if they are — please let me know in the comments.

What else?

This is a line from one of my favourite animated movies. The Swan Princess. Derek professes his undying love to Odette and when she asks why he says it’s because she’s beautiful and she responds with “What Else?”

This stuck with me throughout my entire writing life. Often times the MC’s are madly in love with each other but can’t really seem to articulate why beyond trauma bonding or a “bond.” I do not doubt that they are in love, I’d just like to know “what else” is it about these person that makes you want to tie yourself to them for eternity. Why are you choosing them, over and over and over? I really love Katniss and Peta from The Hunger Games because despite being trauma bonded, I really found that their romantic attachment was fully developed beyond trauma and “yeah, you’re hot.”

So often we get stunning, sweeping statements of how and you came into my life, and I just knew. Ok — why? Is it the curve of her smile, the nervous tick he has when he thinks no-one is looking, is it the pause she holds before she says something opposite to what she’s thinking and only he would know that because YOU pay attention to her. Only she would see the way you scan the room for exits because she is privy to the depths of your soul and trauma in a way that makes her understand why YOU do it. Where are the things that ground their love — things that aren’t a fucking bond.

Fated Mates.

Oh — I’ll probably get some hate for this one, but whatever. I can’t stand it. So often it’s lazy. It’s a substitute for developing a romance, instead of bothering to write why they fall in love past instalust we just get BAM, FATED MATES!

Now please, do not get it twisted — I LOVE bonded mates. I love the idea that characters can choose to step into a bond that could quite literally kill them to break, I love the idea that someone who is bonded to a person can share perhaps — their powers, the inner workings of their minds, can talk to them through the bond. I just CANNOT stand the idea that the universe in its infinite wisdom took two random people who never met and decided ahh yes, they shall be in love.

I think this is why — unlike a lot of people who can’t stand the “personality-less” Elaine. I’m looking forward to her wrenching the shackles of being fated from her shoulders.

But while we are on this topic. I really — really, cannot take the word mate blergh. Once or twice, fine — repeated ad nauseum borders on insufferable. Mostly because, for me, it boils down their relationship to something not chosen, but thrust upon them. They’re my mate — not my wife/husband, not my equal, not my partner not even just using their damn name. She/he’s my mate. I think at this point my brain just blocks it out.

Ahh at last we reach the penultimate trope of my spiralling rant.

Miscommunication

There is nothing that will make me slam a book shut faster than miscommunication. Please, for the LOVE of God, if you’re going to do it do it well. Don’t make us suffer two-hundred plus pages of what could have just been a two sentences. Please. Don’t.

Maybe it works because the characters are often very young and I guess very young people aren’t very good at communicating. But it’s something that really, really gets on my nerves.

Anyway, it’s so rarely done well that I wonder why bother doing it at all other than you need to fill pages and what works better than a petulant, pointless, teenage back and forth over the most MUNDANE shit on the planet. “Does he/she like me, because they said this on thing once or didn’t say the exact thing I needed them to or wont share state fucking secrets with me and now instead of just ASKING what it meant I’ll cold-shoulder them, pretend something has changed, flirt with this bone head or I don’t even know what.” Please just have a damn conversation or come up with a better reason for the misunderstanding because if this book as aimed at women with a developed frontal lobe a lot of the miscommunication is infantile.

Two line characters and the gratuitous death they give us

There’s a phenomena in books, a character, always affable, always a ray of sunshine, will be killed. It’s the equivalent of being the black guy in an early 90’s horror movie. They waltz onto the page and the only thing they provide is character development for the main character. They posses none of their own, they are wallpaper.

And, yet, somehow everyone is shocked when they’re murdered despite having the character development of a plank of wood. They exist to drive the plot, they exist to provide some living trauma for the MC’s, they exist to serve as shock value. They are not killed because the author doesn’t have “plot armour”, they’re killed because they were never meant to live.

I’m all for randomly killing off characters by the way, I just want it to truly be shocking, why kill them in book one when you can slaughter them mindlessly in book three after you’ve lured your reader into thinking they’re safe. The plot protects them. You whisper to yourself as you turn the next page and their life is cut short, like an unfinished sentence it leaves a real void because they actually had been developed into a character that had something to live for. Not simply told to us that they had something to live for.

Game of Thrones does this perfectly. Some people find George RR Martin’s writing style a little too nihilistic, I think more people need to take note of how to throw away plot armour and make a death hit like a gut punch.

So there you have it. My little rant about tropes I think are overused, badly deployed (not saying I can do it any better by the way) or just straight up need to get in the bin.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk. And as I mentioned at the start, this is tongue in cheek, there is ABSOLUTELY no reason you shouldn’t enjoy them, I’m firmly in the club of people are allowed to like things.

World building … for some it’s the sole reason to write fantasy, for others it’s the bane of their existence.

At some point in a fantasy writers career you stumble upon the inevitable question… how long does it take my characters to get from point A to point B on horseback in my fictional world that I haven’t mapped out yet… or you start to worry that the political system that’s integral to your plot — has absolutely no foundations whatsoever.

I love world building — a friend of mine recently told me that it’s a legit role in D&D and my God, do I feel like I missed out… I digress, world building…

I’m a bit of a pantser when it comes to writing, but there is some method to my madness and it sits neatly within the world building. Now… this may be a little basic, but I hope it helps…

MAPS

First thing’s first — unless you’re using a real country/place you’re going to need to orient yourself with the world you’re writing in, and that requires a map! You don’t have to be good at drawing, you don’t have to be particularly visual, but a scribble on a piece of paper with various landmarks dotted about that you can refer to will help you massively in the long run.

My top tip for drawing an entirely fictional world — rice! Get rice and drop it in clumps over paper, trace around the edges and gaps and TA-DA you have a country. Don’t forget to orient your world — it doesn’t matter if South is North or West is East, all that matters is that you have something to quickly refer to when you’re writing so that you don’t randomly claim the sun rises in the West only to change it to the North later in the story.

If you’re inclined to take your map skills to the next level you can use https://inkarnate.com/ which has a free fantasy map building tool — or you can commission one of the very talented map illustrators out there. Though it helps to have a basic idea of what you want.

I also find having a map to refer to helps with pacing…

PACING

This is something that took me a very long time to learn. I would often start my novels in completely the wrong place and just run out of steam somewhere around the midway mark — which was at roughy 70-100k words, because I had sooooooo much shit that just didn’t need to be in the work bulking up the novel, and making me think I’d actually written something worth reading.

But trust me, it’s not as hard as you think!

If you’re really struggling the Saves The Cat Story Beat Sheet (and book) is a great place to start, it takes you through the protagonists/heroes journey and gives you very clear instructions on when, where and why certain things should be happening to them in order to keep a reader hooked, and your story flowing.

Outside of Saves The Cat I studied Anime — like a lot of Anime, specifically their openings. The writers really, really know how to start a story and I realised the best films/books/manga etc all have one thing in common, they start in the action and they trust the viewer/reader to keep up.

trust your reader!

I know, I know — you’ve spent, possibly years, on your fantasy and you want the reader to have as MUCH info as possible so they know your world as well as you do, so you want to start further back so they understand everything before they’ve even gotten to the point of the novel.

The best novels with the best pacing aren’t spoon feeding you anything, they’re trusting you keep up and connect the dots.

But that’s not say you shouldn’t have all of this deep dive of information somewhere, it’s just YOU the writer should have it, not the reader. I use Scrivener to create a series bible where I keep every single fact about the characters, place, monsters, magic system… heck even food if its important. You do NOT have to have this perfected before you start writing, but it’s worth keeping in the background so you can build it out as you go along.

POLITICAL AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE

I think the reason Game of Thrones works so well is because it’s based on real history… and happens to have dragons. Anyone who grew up in the UK or likes history will recognise it’s direct inspiration is the 15th Century dynastic struggle known as The Wars of Roses.

When it comes to creating your political and social structures I truly don’t see any point in reinventing the wheel. This is where I look to history. There is truly not a single thing (abstracting from actual magic) that I can think of that hasn’t already existed at one point in our collective past. The Romans for instance, have got to be some of the most unhinged fuckers to have walked this planet.

Not sure where you start? History Hit has fantastic podcasts and shows that really help to bring history to life.

Truly — become a history nerd, your worlds will feel so much richer!

Dialogue

This is a tough one. One that I think a lot of writers admit to struggling with, myself included, and I’m afraid to say there aren’t really any quick fixes or perfect solutions.

My process varies but there are a few things that remain constant.

1. I always read my dialogue aloud, if it sounds weird af, stilted, awkward etc… when I say it, I have to change it.

2. Watch films / shows, with a similar vibe to your novel. That’s it… just watch and listen and really pay attention to the patterns used

3. Eavesdrop on people and write down anything that catches your attention. We all do it…

4. Conversations do not run linearly. Lets look at the below examples.

“Are you ready to go to Mordor?”

“Yes, I am.”

“How are you?” William asked Sarah.

“I am fine thank you. How are you?” Sarah replied.

“I am also fine, but you look sad.” William said.

“Yes. I was sad the about the cat in the hat.” Sarah sighed.

“Why were you sad about the cat in the hat?” William asked,

“Because it lost it’s hat,” Sarah shrugged.

“That is sad. Well, lets go and find its hat. Then we can discuss the important thing about the ring we have to take to mordor.” Said William assuringly.

The above, is grade A shit — Whilst people do, at times state their feelings, having a character simply tell the reader doesn’t allow the reader to discover anything — like for instance that Sarah might chew her nails when distressed… In real conversations, it’s rare to find anyone who explains outright what’s going on in their heads, they might trail off mid-sentence, switch track or circle away from something that might be uncomfortable, sometimes they’ll say the opposite of what they mean. As a writer I go back to the concept of trusting your readers, trust them, please! Let them read between the lines, notice the hesitations and glances. There is beauty in the silences, and it’s also a great place to play with punctuation. (How many times have we agonised over using an exclamation mark!)

Taking the same short passage (and I’m by no means saying it’s great…) I re-worked the above monstrosity (albeit very quickly… so again, it’s not great), but what I’ve tried to do is show you what trusting the reader means, how you can leave gaps in the dialogue, how you can use silence and body language to fill in the spaces. Even with characters who don’t know one another, it can work because body language is often-times just as important, if not more important than what’s being said aloud.

“Ready to—” William hesitated, noticing the pull of Sarah’s shoulders “—What’s wrong?”

“Oh —” she looked away with a sigh, her gaze trailing the rain against the window “—it’s the cat.”

William lowered his voice so the other customers wouldn’t hear. “the hat?”

Sarah nodded, a small huff of breath escaping her as she blinked up at the ceiling, “and now we have to go to—”

“Mordor, I know… I wish we could delay the whole thing.” He leant against the table, folding his arms across his chest, a distracted travelling companion was never a good thing.

“Hat first — ring second, it can wait a day.” He said. Sarah turned to him, her eyes moving to his as the corner of her mouth twitched upwards.

MAGIC SYSTEMS

In Fantasy you can have a hard magic system, or a soft magic system — and neither is wrong, but with any magic system the more grounded you can make it, the more visceral it will feel to the reader.

For instance, in a softer magic system the characters might have a mixture of magic accessible to their fingers that reads more like something accessed through intuition, but that doesn’t mean said magic might not have it’s limits. Is it mentally draining? Is it inherited, are there any characters who don’t have it?

In a harder magic system you’ll have stricter rules in place. For instance in One Dark Window by Rachel Gillig, you have to have the cards, you have to tap them to activate them and you have to tap them again to close the magic. The magic comes from the cards and the cards take from you while you’re using them.

I really recommend — before writing anything, that you hone this down, because it will affect the plot more than you think. And I think the only way to really inspiration for it is to read and watch as much as you can.

ABOVE ALL ELSE

I mentioned it before, but I’ll say it again — get to know history, get to know the world we actually live in, read anything you can get your hands on and read outside of your genre. You don’t have to be an expert on a subject, but if for instance your character is very good at chess and you have no idea what a good play looks like you’re going to struggle to write convincingly about it — so find a book on chess and read it.

Got any other questions around world building? Let me know in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer!

I thought, since I’m a writer on a quest for superstardom that it only made sense to document the ever painful, and excruciatingly embarrassing experience of putting myself out there only to be rejected — because not everyone’s story is “I wrote a book in a month and got an agent in two days.” *sobs into laptop*

To introduce myself, because I don’t think I’ve ever done that — I’m Sophie. I’ve been writing since I could pick up a pencil and my first “finished” work was a fanfiction based on the anime Escaflowne (TV version not film) because boy was I pissed off by the ending. I was eight, it was not good but it sparked something in me I’ve spent a lifetime feeling embarrassed about — A desire to write romantic stories against the brutal backdrop of war, terror and a QUEST FOR VENGEANCE, as well as a whole host of broken and horrendous worlds.

In my 20’s I convinced myself I had to do real adult things like start a business and try to be a girlboss — because apparently real adults don’t sit down with their imaginary friends for long periods of time. I genuinely LOVED my business, it’s just that actually running a business was well… hard. I had burnout and realised that almost a decade of trying to ignore my creative spirit was exhausting. It’s not that I didn’t write in this time it’s just that I didn’t take it seriously. I thought writing was something I’ll do when I finally make it… Apparently finally making it is having COVID, Brexit and getting fucked over by your stockists and fund all in the same damn year leading to closing said business was what MAKING IT would look like for me. lol.

After some personal trauma I’m not ready to talk about, I went back to writing.

I’ve now completed three manuscripts — all with spicy romance because I was never a closed doors type of girl. The first manuscript at 120k words loosely revolves around Excalibur, and it got me plenty of rejections and taught me a LOT about querying, mostly it taught me that it’s brutal af.

One rejection from an agent who asked me to query her with future work, spurred me on to write something new, if you ever read this — even if you never represent me THANK YOU!

This gave birth to my second fantasy 107k words, less grounded in romance, third person POV and considerably more epic in scope. It had me dredging up my (albeit) limited knowledge with the Anglo-Saxon language, which is courtesy of my brief stint translating Beowulf when I accidentally signed up to study it at Uni thinking we’d study the text… not translate it.

This manuscript is now out in the world querying — it might not be right for the agent… I’ll find out… but I LOVE it. The quality of my writing between these two is — in my opinion — chalk and cheese. I love both but this one makes me want to go back and rework the other because I learnt so much along the way, plotting, pacing, even just my ability to really tighten up a magic system were all honed on this one.

The third manuscript at 95k words is by far my most unhinged work. It’s back in the POV I find the most comfortable to write — first person — and it’s a cyberpunk vampire mafia romance. I thought for a moment it was dark romance… but then I looked at dark romance properly and well… yeah — it’s romance in a dark world.

This is the novel I will self-publish. I’ve been working with some amazing beta readers and have been shamelessly self-promoting myself as I gear up to officially announce its release. There are a few things I need to get in order before I can officially confirm when I will self-publish — but I have no desire to find an agent for this one. I don’t know why — maybe I’m just growing tired of hoping someone in the industry will notice me, it’s a tough world and ultimately it’s a business. Or maybe it’s because I genuinely don’t want a publishing house deciding the cover, the title… basically anything… I just want their money and little black book of contacts (there I said it, so what… marketing without money is hard. I would know, I did it before.) With the fantasies I feel more open, they’re just so damn huge in scope it feels daunting to go it alone… but anyway, I digress.

I understand the fact publishing is more and more a business… maybe it’s always been that way — I really do. When I had my company and spent over a year looking for VC investment (I was successful in the end… persistence really is key in most things it seems) I grew a thick skin. I got used to being told the idea wasn’t right — not right for now — to outlandish — outright stupid etc etc. you learn that subjectivity is what it is, and you can take a horse to water but you can’t force it to drink.

Looking at the landscape of the publishing industry I feel that it’s the same — some of the runaway success stories have come from self-published indie authors, while the big 5 peddle the same rotation of authors on their books because it makes them money — and let’s face it, they need to make money, they are not charities, so I don’t harbour any ill will. I just realised slowly over this past year and a half that waiting for someone else to make your dreams come true is rather silly.

I also fell down a rabbit hole as of late, paranoid about AI detectors ruining my life and some rabid online witch hunt coming for me. I flatter myself into thinking I will one day be famous enough to worry about that.

I don’t use AI to write, but I opened a pangram account and fed it a cut from my work I wasn’t going to use… it came back with 25% AI assisted, I tweaked a few things it came back with an even higher rating, I threw some spelling mistakes in and suddenly I was human. All this to say it made me feel sick to my stomach and led to an existential crisis. After sitting with the dread of false accusations for a book/books I hadn’t even released yet, and letting my mind run rampant over every conceivable awful scenario — ranging from all of my previous work is lost in some freak accident to I pee myself on stage during a book tour I don’t even have booked let alone know if it would be big enough to require a stage, I realised fuck it — I cannot do anything to stop people feeding my hard work into machines or pointing fingers, I can’t really do anything about some bitter Betty’s coming for me — all I can do is write.

So I do just that, and I make a bit more of a concerted effort to document the process, I save more drafts. I used to just write over the top of the same one like the unhinged millennial I am. I have gone back to keeping physical notebooks and not just making notes in my phone. I’m not going to burden myself with heaps more effort — I tell myself it’s sort of fun to look back and see the journey from draft to finished manuscript unfold, so why not.

Finally…since this is meant to be an update and in reality I think I’ve just waffled on — I’ve been asked by a few people I know who want to write a novel — how I can write so much? So just to say don’t compare your output to someone else, some people can write a book in a month (I can’t) and some take years, there’s not really any right or wrong. For me, my current situation means I can treat writing as my full time job even though I have absolutely no income from it whatsoever. I write a lot, I write fast (probably because of hyper-fixation) and I’m privileged enough to have the time to do it. While I’m in this position I’ll be continuing to churn out as much work as I can. And I’ll continue to shout about it from the rooftops — because after last year (a year that shook me to my core and changed the person I am entirely) I realised life is short and being embarrassed about wanting to be a writer is silly.

Lastly — I want to hear from you! What have you been working on? How do you find time to write? Does anyone want to join a delulu club where we all cheer each other on?

Ok, so maybe the internet isn’t dead yet — but I’ll tell you what is. Instagram (and TikTok for that matter). — No, scratch that, maybe it’s the internet as well.

For a while now I’ve been holding onto Instagram like the decrepit millennial that I am. But I realised after logging back on to post something to my stories and inevitably being dragged down a rabbit hole of doom scrolling, that the feed was essentially dead.

Dead because after you’ve seen one reel you’ve seen them all. Dead because there’s only so many times I can scroll past yet another advert of an AI fruit selling me a workout to get a peach shaped ass. Dead because my thumb grew tired of opening and closing the app so I could scroll past the ads to begin with instead of being forced to watch them. Dead because there’s only so many times I can be sold a course on how to get a personality — sorry I mean achieve the clean girl aesthetic or get rich by being lazy, interspersed with apocalyptic horror before one considers tearing their eyes out.

I think it’s on purpose. I think we are being force-fed slop and encouraged to replicate the same content over and over for a reason. That reason being that little by little we lose the will to ask questions, to be curious, to want quality.

To get on my favourite hate topic. AI — I think the term “Artificial Intelligence” is a misnomer, there is nothing intelligent about it — it is an LLM that has cannibalised the human experience and now regurgitates it to us while simultaneously sucking up water and shitting out pollutants both online and in the literal world. At some point, considering more and more people are becoming insanely lazy and using AI to create their output for them, the LLM will cease to learn, it’s an ouroboros, devouring itself with no way out. It cannot think, it cannot create something new (despite what you believe), only what came before in a multitude of ways that feels novel until you realise it’s really not.

I discussed this with my husband, theorising to him that the increasing use of AI in the financial markets will lead to higher and higher yields but that should a “once in a lifetime event” occur (and lets face it, as millennials we know they’re coming as regular as the sun rising) AI will only know one way to react, by absolutely bombing the stock market because that’s what the LLM has learnt through the consumption of human history is what happens and should happen. I like to think he agrees with me — but who knows, he actually works in finance, I just bitch about it while reaping the benefits of being a SAHW with a load of time to write posts on substack apparently.

I digress — I don’t give much of a shit about the circle wanking financial markets or “American Exceptionalism” that Bloomberg is desperate to repeat anytime it has to try and explain why some company that constantly looses money and has no path to profit and is actively destroying the planet and human experience is somehow a good thing. The only exceptional thing is that people keep bank rolling it through subsidies. These oh so “exceptional” conglomerates are cannibalistic welfare queens.

Anyway, back to the internet. It’s dead. That’s it, I honestly think when the world wide web is being flooded with so much AI generated shit it can’t possibly be alive any more. I find myself scrolling past another AI generated article that promises me how to crack the system and achieve XYZ and I wonder… why should I bother reading or interacting with content you can’t even be arsed to create yourself? There was a brief period in time, somewhere deep down during my depression that I watched an inordinate amount of AI slop videos of Rhysand — I thought briefly, oh cool, people can now put videos out of their favourite shadow daddy’s — as if my tiny little brain had forgotten that people can also pick up a pencil and draw and had been doing just that for basically all of human history… I should know, I studied Art History. So after I woke up from that bizarre little spell, I swiftly dumped all of the accounts — look, we all make mistakes.

I think it was the AI Fruit Slop Love Island that did it for me. The thing that pushed me over the edge and into deleting Instagram. Somewhere between live streamed horrors and well — fruit slop — I cracked.

The ever increasing dose of slop spoon-fed into our eyes while scrolling on the toilet in a similar fashion to the idiot watching “ow my balls” on Idiocracy is staggering. Content creators make content about making content — while course sellers sell courses on selling courses and crypto bros… I don’t know — they oscillate between living in their mum’s basement and having more money than sense depending on which way the market goes. I think we’re getting ever closer to Charlie Brooker’s imagined nightmarescapes of Black Mirror.

Substack feels like a welcome break from the brain rot and I hope it will stay this way, because I really — really — do not want to start seeing “Here’s what I learnt from XYZ” lists à la LinkedIn.

The first time I read Wuthering Heights, I experienced it much like others did. I was a young teenager, filled with angst and swooning over Heathcliff and the messy drama within the pages of Brontë’s Gothic masterpiece. I didn’t really understand what I was reading… then I read it again, and then I studied it.

To say my perception changed is an understatement. This is not a “great love story,” it is not bodice ripping passion, or “moist” vibes. It’s viscous people doing viscous things and where Heathcliff is concerned… may that type of love NEVER find me.

The marketing around “Wuthering Heights,” I am convinced, has been purposefully “rage baiting” us. Tongues are wagging, bloggers are blogging, historical dress experts are pissed about the inaccurate costume design… and the corsetry. Everyone seems to have something to say about Emerald Fennell’s adaption of this much loved—but often misunderstood novel. Or should we say misrepresented? After all, this is not the first time Wuthering Heights has graced our screens as an epic love story. In fact, the trailer and many shots seem to be taken straight out of the 1939 film staring Lawrence Olivier… right down to “The greatest love story of all time.”

Online I’ve seen an onslaught of bookstagram accounts cracking open the spines of this classic and being completely shocked by the contents within. There’s been a great many memes around the difficulty in reading such a classic, and many people wondering whether they should even bother reading it before seeing the film. I’m here to say — if you don’t care one fig for the themes explored within the novel, if you don’t want to find the characters utterly repulsive, if you don’t want to be as let down as the rest of us by this film — don’t bother reading it. Whatever has landed on our screens has little to do with Emily Brontë’s only novel.

I can’t help but wonder, when I watch interviews of Fennell discussing the novel, why she felt adapting it was so difficult that she chose to essentially sanitise its core themes until the novel resembles an erotic dark romance for the booktok era? Claiming this is what she remembers reading when she was fourteen, and then apparently never bothering to read it again, seems a strange way to go about adapting one of the UK’s most famous literary works.

This is not Frank Herberts sweeping space opera, Dune. Almost impossible to bring to life without the might of modern cgi (though David Lynch’s 1984 adaption is a wild acid trip), and a huge budget to drag the many storylines through multiple movies, otherwise I’m sure we’d all die of boredom (and I LOVE the novels).

No. Wuthering Heights is a novel that explores racial tensions, snobbery and class struggles, domestic violence and generational trauma. It’s a novel shaped by the harsh, isolating landscape it’s set in. It’s a novel that doesn’t need huge budgets or serialising, the themes are complex but the narrative is such that they are beautifully and brutally explored in heartbreaking ways. It is rich for adaptation, especially in the current climate we find ourselves in, if one only takes the time to sit down and truly read it.

This adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” perhaps is best relegated to the unserious side of booktok. As one commentator said, it’s the “matcha Dubai chocolate labubu” remake we never asked for, but I’m certain may of us will enjoy.

Because here’s the thing. This is Fennell’s imagining of the novel, it’s her fever dream memory, a fever dream we likely all had if we read it (far too young) to really appreciate what it’s about it.

Expecting Fennell to produce for us a stunning, in depth exploration, filled with historical accuracy based on the themes explored within the novel, when her previous work is meant to shock and very little else, would always leave one disappointed. Though I for one loved her take on The Talented Mr Ripley going to Brideshead — aka Saltburn, even if she won’t admit that’s where the inspiration came from.

While we sit here, many of us vilifying her adaptation, we must also remember that because of it — an entirely new generation of readers are about to be introduced to Brontë’s masterpiece. They’re certainly in for a shock. But, in a time where literacy rates are declining, I’m here for anything that gets people reading and thinking critically about what we consume, and how information and knowledge can change drastically depending on the person serving it to us. Maybe it’s time for an adaptation of 1984 to grace our screens…?

One thing is for certain, when the newer generation pick up Wuthering Heights, they probably won’t find Heathcliff being a wife beating, dog murdering, necrophile as swoon worthy as Elordi’s on screen portrayal.

This will sound judgemental and bitchy, because it’s supposed to sound judgemental and bitchy — but if you don’t like the process of writing why the fuck are you trying to be an author?

Over the past couple of years it’s hard to ignore the fact the there are some amongst us who — rather than bothering to sit down and weep over a blank page and painstakingly build a story bit by grinding bit like dragging blood from a stone — get AI to do it for them. And I’m not talking about a little bit of help with research or remembering the whatchamacallits or thingymajigs, I’m not even talking about a paragraph here or there (which I will begrudgingly forgive providing 99.99% of the work is yours!), I’m talking about full on getting the whole damn thing written by an LLM and then proudly — for whatever fucking reason beyond my comprehension— passing it off as their work.

“Oh but the story is my idea.” Or “but I’m just not very good with pretty sentences.” Or “but I just used it to expand paragraphs” they bemoan, as if the process of vividly hallucinating at our desks as we come up with a word salad that stretches on for thousands upon thousands of words simply falls into our lap and isn’t the result of countless hours, hundreds, thousands over the course of our lives to do just that.

No, babe, they don’t — the pretty sentences take time and are seldom there on the first shot.

But now, because of these two-bit hacks taking the worlds laziest detour through the life of a writer — I posit that at some point they’ll get lazy and move on because if you don’t really like something it’s hard to keep doing it — I digress, now because of these interlopers we, the actual writers who cry into the abyss praying for a plot hole to fix itself, are causally thrown under the bus with them.

“Oh this person likes the em dash and uses repetition — obviously AI, RUIN THEM!” Screams The Atlantic after it runs yet another authors book through fucking Pangram. Yes please, by all means feed our AI overlords more — the machine is hungry, and some of you apparently are desperate for a modern day Salem -_-.

It might surprise you to learn, despite my diatribe, that I’m not entirely against AI… providing it stays the hell away from the arts. Though I’m also not stupid enough to think this mass surveillance tool is anything but what it is, complete with free gimmicks to keep the hoi polloi distracted while our self-appointed — not bullied enough at school — techno overlords scrape the earth of more resources and look for ways to leave us fighting in the dirt when the inevitable happens.

Anyway, I started with the question. Why the fuck does everyone want to be a writer all of a sudden? Because it baffles me why someone who showed no interest in writing… painting… drawing… whatever until a computer could do it for them is now forcing it down our throats.

These are the same people who would probably call us weirdos, or loners, or just outright laugh in our faces if they found out we were at home carving stories out of thin air instead of trying to be “cool”, “popular” and “grown up” whatever the hell that means. But now, now because they can hallucinate with an LLM they suddenly think they can have the creative spirit move through them, the creative spirit we spent our youths being bullied for.

When I read of another person proudly proclaiming we’re all Luddites and should just use AI because you can churn out a book in a week and you’re obviously going to win the race (what fucking race?) my question is this. You could do anything, anything and you choose the ARTS?! You choose the thing that gives us our humanity and you outsource it to a damn machine? There is no deus ex machina. These LLM’s are artifacts of the human condition, they are only ever capable of spitting out random assortments of the things they’ve been (illegally) fed.

To those of you happily throwing your newly acquired use of the word Luddite around I ask this…

When the war with the clankers happens do you think these robots will come and save you?!

Do you think your favourite tech-bro gives a shit about whether you’re obsequious enough or not?

Do you think these tech-bros embraced Asimov’s three laws of robotics? Because I sure as hell don’t.

Heck — while I’m at it, I know a lot of you sycophants are salivating over Dune (I do love the films gotta admit) and yet most of you haven’t even read the book and know nothing about the Butlerian Jihad! — or have even figured out Paul might not be the man he’s cracked up to be, but I won’t give you any spoilers.

Duncan? Would you love me if I was a worm…

Sorry — back to the point at hand.

I know that writing is not easy. I know that it can be tempting to take a shortcut. I have never used AI to write my novels, but I will be honest with you — I can’t draw very well — having not picked up a pencil since I was 15 — and I’ll admit that there was a brief moment where I got very excited at the prospect of being able to create artwork of my characters that I can flood Instagram with.

Considering I am so vehemently against writers using LLMs I don’t know why, in any capacity I thought it was OK to use it for artwork. So I sat with that thought and some shitty renders and realised how goddamn icky it made me feel to essentially have a machine take someone else’s hard work and regurgitate it as “my own”. Suffice to say those renders will NEVER EVER SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY! Instead, I reached out to a very, very talented friend of mine to work with her instead — and I am SO excited to be able to have HUMAN MADE artwork for my human made book!

All of this to say, please — PLEASE — for the love of God will those of you who don’t actually want to learn the process, sit with the process, do any of the process, try and fail and try again with the process of creating art and just want to have an LLM spit it out for you, move on with your lives and do something else? You’re ruining the industry and us artists are already treated and paid like shit as it is.

K? Thanks.

Sometimes I find the best thing to dig your way out of writers block — is to just go unhinged.

There are times in my writing journey where I have felt so, so, soooo stuck that instead of trying to push through I just write the most bizarre and wonderfully wacky tangent for my darlings to get up to while I try and figure out the real beat.

I think it helps to not take our work too seriously — I don’t know, maybe that’s me. So without further ado and apropos of nothing other than just for fun, here are 5 unhinged fantasy writing prompts for when you’re feeling stuck.

1. A dragon that is terrible at being a dragon — they hate flying, can’t breathe fire and they’re petty as fuck.

2. A necromancer who raises the dead purely to get opinions on their outfit. That is it — they do not care for anything other than their own vanity.

3. The final battle is interrupted after the tavern they both went to gave them food poisoning.

4. Your “chosen one” is not the “chosen one” which is why everything keeps going wrong — no one will admit the mistake. Maybe that makes them chosen after all…

5. Magic gets stronger through lying — so the fae court is rife with petty fights and grudges.

Have fun!

There are two ways I start my novels. Either a scene presents itself to me — like a perfectly wrapped present usually at the most inopportune moment. Or the characters walk into my head — wants and desires laid bare and I scramble to find a world to put them in.

Either way — the same follows.

Hours and hours spent hunched at my desk like a sort of demented gremlin as the story unfolds itself to me.

You see — I’m a pantser (is that the phrase…), a fly by the edge of my seat type of girl, my process is chaos and exploration and whilst I do have moments where I’ll brain dump a basic plot — I do know what point A and B is… I just don’t have a clear plan the way some writers do of how to get there. Heck — I’ve outlined one series from Book 1 to 5, I know what the major plot and subplot in each will be, which villain needs to be vanquished and which of my darlings will not be making it to the end… beyond that, lets see where the characters take me, and I’m not afraid to change the arc as I go.

Sometimes (before I deleted instagram) I would look on enviously at authors who could plot from start to finish every chapter and then actually stick to it. Comparison is the thief of joy my dear readers, and it also makes things more complicated than they need to be.

For a long time I convinced myself I had to follow a formula, I simply HAD to plan the novel out chapter by chapter because that’s what real writers do. And with this approach I achieved the grand sum of absolutely nothing. I’d start a new project and it would die somewhere around chapter seven because I simply did not care for the plot I’d imagined before I started to write.

I realised — that for me — the story evolves and changes so much from its inception that it’s no wonder I was getting stuck when I tried to follow a predetermined route. I don’t need a GPS to take me to my destination, I’m happy to go forwards on vibes — I don’t mind if I have to turn around, take a wrong turn and write fifty pages of nonsense I’ll cut, I don’t mind the U turn I might need to take to get back on track. I learnt to trust that eventually I’ll get to where the story needs to go.

After that epiphany I realised the other thing holding me back was — in part, the chaos. It’s all well and good to enjoy going along for the ride, but if I don’t keep track, if I don’t at some point put my foot down with my darlings they’ll drag me over a cliff and into a proverbial free-fall. So I needed to find a way to organise the chaos, because the never ending list of notes and chaotic brain dumps at the end of my word/pages/scrivener document were getting a little out of hand and very, very hard to keep track of.

The system I have in place now is still — mostly — chaos, but it’s a sort of chaos that works for me.

I start with a word document (pages to be precise as I refuse to pay a subscription fee to MS Office for something that you used to buy once). I tend to write the first draft in chronological order and will happily, upon reaching moments where I don’t know how to continue, just put INSERT CHAPTER HERE — with some vague amount of notes of what that chapter should consist of. I often have multiple versions of the same draft for no other reason than I might decide to take the story in two different tangents and see which one I prefer.

For instance my high fantasy has two entirely different openings and vibes, I wrote roughly 40-50k words of ‘friends to lovers’ before I realised everything about it was wrong. But I liked it, so I kept it and happily trotted back and started it all again on the now far more satisfying and less contrived ‘slow burn enemies to lovers’…

I also have a Scrivener document on the go. This is where I keep track of the actual plot as it unfolds, the ideas for the plot I have, the characters, wording building, magic systems… anything I need to keep track of from eye colour to research lives here. If I delete scenes or have scenes or moments that have no place to go, I store them here. I don’t always start this document straight away, so it also becomes the bane of my life when I realise I’ve forgotten to do it and then have to go back and populate it midway through writing — but trust me when I say using it in this way has been a LIFESAVER for my chaos.

As I like to write series over stand-alone I eventually create a second scrivener document, so then I essentially have one that acts as a “Series Bible” and one that tracks the events in whichever book I’m writing.

I then make a third Scrivener document — did I say anything about this process would make sense… for the finished manuscript, this is where I put the version I’ll send to my kindle (though I seldom edit within this document, editing is reserved for print off’s and pages).

I have a notebook — yes a physical notebook (moleskins are my favourite though I do love a smythson), because I like to jot down any ideas I have while I’m on the go and sometimes my phone just doesn’t feel like the write place to do it. It’s filled with notes for any story I have in mind — I’m thinking I will start dedicating one notebook to each story. I often find if I’m stuck on the plot, physically writing and mapping it out helps.

Notes app on my phone, this is indispensable to me. I write a lot on my phone, multiple chapters live there. This is often because midway through a run or a dog walk a scene will unfold in my head and I need to jot it down before it’s left somewhere on the forest floor.

Finally there’s the random scraps of paper, because I draw maps of my settings and often need to chart a characters movements — even if its as mundane as making sure the room I’ve just described them moving about in makes sense. I don’t think it’s healthy how much it drives me to distraction, but I really really can’t have inconsistencies in a setting.

And there you have it, a little insight into my chaotic process that helps me keep track of all of the little worlds I build. Maybe you’ll find some of it useful, maybe you’ll think I’m bat-shit crazy.

It came to my attention that there’s been a bit of a spat on TikTok whereby some are accusing authors of being ableist if they use “big words” in their writing.

As if the concept of being introduced to a wider vocabulary is somehow tantamount to being forced to stand with a dunce cap on your head in the corner of the room while the other children point and laugh at you.

Perhaps it might surprise those who recoil in horror from luxuriant language, that dictionaries exist — google can help, your kindle can tell you, heck in a pinch ask ChatGPT if you’re really are stuck (though maybe please don’t given the environmental impact…). All this to say, don’t be lazy — and don’t, whatever you do, try and hide behind labelling something as “ableist” when it’s not. Considering you are capable of reading/listening to a novel I highly doubt the breadth of your abilities stops short at a basic google search.

There was a time in life when EVERY WORD was a big word for us because we were learning our mother-tongue, it’s not as if a single one of us was born with the OED in our heads — or that some of us popped out with the ability to command the sort of flowery language and prose that would make a Victorian weep.

As a writer I obviously like words. I play with them for fun and force them into sentences that over time create, what I like to think of, as rich little worlds for people to get lost in if they so choose to trust me to take them along for a jaunt through whatever fictional nightmare-scape I’ve created for my poor suffering protagonists.

My vocabulary certainly isn’t the largest — which is why I read a great deal. Like a lot actually, as much as I can from as many places as I can, though my fascinations often comes in waves.

I try writing in different styles, I try to switch things up between first person POV and third. I think I’ve found my voice, but my use of language and the em dash is erratic at best. My grandmother often messages me to tell me of some strange new word she’s just discovered and is enjoying learning how to use — it gives me immense pleasure because it means, I too, get to learn a new word.

But back to the point at hand — “NO BIG WORDS!” — I blame the fact that for many, consuming the written word has been so de-prioritised that it hardly happens at all. I found it amazing to discover that not many people I know read much as children or even as adults (and I grew up in the 90’s -00’s!) and that as the years have gone by even less and less and children are being introduced to concepts and words that might challenge them.

For instance, I saw discourse on whether The Hobbit was suitable for children…did we all collectively forget that Tolkien wrote it for his own child? It’s a children’s book. Of course it’s suitable for them, does that mean the language is easy… no, why should it be. Children are sponges, fill those little pea brains with as much as you can… that’s what I plan to do if I’m ever lucky enough to have them.

Reading is supposed to challenge you, it’s supposed to expand your horizons not provide neat little boxes for you to quietly hide within. I mean — not everything you read needs such a grandiose purpose, I think reading can also be purely for pleasure… for instance I LOVE the type of thrillers that don’t ask much of me other than to just come along for the ride. (That’s not to say thrillers can’t be grandiose btw!)

I think, most of all I find the statement that its ableist very sad, because beneath the statement it’s a just a fear… learning new words can be daunting, trying to use them can even be embarrassing — the amount of things I’ve mispronounced over the years lives rent free in my head… for instance I said Pianist wrong for a good twenty years (at least for the part of Surrey I grew up in… I still don’t know if I say it right.) — but mostly I think that there’s something very sad about wanting to keep your vocabulary small.

It’s harder, for instance, to examine your thoughts and ideas if you don’t have the language with which to do it with — which I think is probably the point but I won’t bore you with my bat-shit crazy conspiracy theories.

Anyway, rant over — pick up a dictionary, read a book, ask your mum/dad/boyfriend/lover/that-person-you-think-is-arty-and-hot/neighbour — I don’t know, just ask someone and stop hiding from “big words” and discomfort. It’s lazy.

“How the f*ck are you so prolific?” - That was my friend’s response — a fellow creative, a screenwriter — when I told her I’d just finished the first draft of another book. It made me chuckle. It also made me sit with a question I didn’t have a ready answer to: am I? Prolific, I mean.

I’m certainly not shovelling snow and banging out horror masterpiece after horror masterpiece like some author we all know… but I do find I have a lot of ideas — not all of which are worth pursuing, but all of which do get the chance to live outside of my head and on paper.

So here’s the tally, for what it’s worth. 2026, so far, has given me two finished first drafts — one around 120k words, the other at 87k — plus a third sitting at 50k. That’s on top of last year’s 140k behemoth I’m still slowly hacking away at, and a side project I’m using to finally, finally learn how to write a standalone novel. (None of these numbers include the notes, the cut scenes, the furious research rabbit holes.)

So maybe “prolific” is the wrong word. What I actually am is someone who, on a deeply personal level, struggles to explain to the people around me why I need to write — not want, NEED. If I don’t, I fear I’ll go insane. I’m not joking.

I sat with that for a while. Not the prolific question though it certainly tickled my ego — the other one. The why.

The truth is my brain has always been, very, very loud. My imagination has been running long before I had any say in the matter. For a year as a child I had three fairies as imaginary friends. I took them to Salzburg with me. I could VIVIDLY see them, hear them… fight with them. Maybe it’s because I was an only child, though I will point out I had real human friends too, I wasn’t entirely three sheets to the wind… and I was never lonely, though I did thrive on being alone. But I don’t think that’s where this came from. I think I just arrived already like this… a little too… imaginative.

As an adult I’ve found myself in the very lucky position of having a lot of free time on my hands. I’m a housewife… with only a dog to look after for the time being. Last year, after going through the type of trauma that makes people take you by the hand and with all the best intentions in the world deadpan say to your face “I couldn’t survive if that happened to me” and leave you wondering what the f*ck you’re supposed to say back to that thanks… I guess — my therapist suggested I start writing again. I’d taken a couple of years hiatus because my business had sucked what little joy I had left for being creative clean out of me, then last years special blend of trauma polished it off.

So I started — I revisited folders and folders and folders of my old stories. I read more. I started putting pen to paper… well in this case fingers to keyboard. My thumbs hurt.

The floodgates opened.

Growing up I was a complete bookworm — my parents sparking the interest in story telling when I was young by reading everything from The Hobbit to Harry Potter, they never said “NO” if I was asking for a book… and if I wasn’t reading I was watching. Stories were my LIFE. Which was weird because I didn’t have much need for escapism, I had — by all accounts a very happy and rather indulged childhood.

Storytelling has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. At the age of eight, Escaflowne burst onto the TV and I BEGGED my parents to let me stay up late so I could watch it. I wrote my first fanfic because I was so pissed off that Hitomi didn’t stay in Gaia with Van. Thank God for the film ending. It was terrible, by the way—maybe ten pages of scrawled handwriting, giving the story the ending I wanted rather than the one I got. I distinctly remember writing "ahhhhhhh", or something to that effect, when Hitomi fell off some floating ship or other. I wish I still had it.

Clearly there was a theme with me because I then wrote a fanfic mash up of The Looking Glass Wars and Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle… I needed drama, I needed wars, I needed broken people against desperate odds in brutal worlds. I needed romance (which the older I got inevitably turned into wanting it to be open door romance!) Anakin Skywalker introduced me to the dark side, Lelouch Lamperouge the tragic hero, Dodge the broken vengeful boy gave me a taste for traumatic backstories and how grief can haunt, and Tolkien made me want to stretch it into an epic world of my own making.

Over the years that first kernel of fan-fiction spawned into something else. I started to write original stories, my deep fascination with history spawned a foray into historical fiction, followed by an obsession with Sci-fi that led to my sorry attempts at a space opera… which paled in comparison to my ridiculous crush on Michael Corleone and absolute delight in discovering Puzo had written The Family — I digress — all this to say there isn’t a genre of writing I haven’t touched, and a fan-fiction I haven’t attempted.

It took me a long time to finish anything. Years in fact, to learn the skill of writing a beginning, middle and end to a story, perhaps in part because when you write fan-fiction you can just keep going and going and going because there is no end you have to conceive, it’s not your world or your work really… you’re just a passenger enjoying a spin in someone else’s car for a moment.

But after I cracked how to actually finish a book… that’s when the real floodgates opened. Stories I’d started and abandoned too many times to count suddenly took an entirely new, fleshy form. Editing became one of my favourite activities — the ruthless bisection of my work gave me reason to wake in the morning. No sooner had I opened my eyes than I was already planning where to go next, what to cut, what to change.

I love my darlings deeply, and I am sorry they must suffer, but suffer they must.

Anyway — all this to say that when I don’t write it’s almost like an itch. It starts small, scarcely noticeable, a little irritation that doesn’t go away. The more I ignore it — the more I try to be a “real grown up” who doesn’t do silly little things like write stories about fairies f*cking (I actually don’t write about fae at all), the more I let others convince me that writing is not something one aspires to do, it is simply something you do in your spare time and never admit to wanting it to be full time — the unhappier I find myself.

And the itch becomes unbearable and I simply want to crawl out of my skin for lack of creating. I imagine many artists feel the same way — and I imagine from the outside it all sounds very melodramatic and a little bit silly. But there it is, the truth laid bare. To not create is simply to not exist. I don’t care if I’m the only person who ever reads my books, I have to write them.

I was walking and talking recently through the woods of Zurich with the aforementioned friend, when I confessed to her something I’d felt too embarrassed to say out loud to anyone else (and yet apparently will now spill to you, dear reader) — I believe in parallel universes, and I don’t think when I write I’m coming up with anything that doesn’t exist in real life somewhere in these infinite universes. To summarise — I don’t write fiction, I write parallel worlds… which, if true, sucks for the people trapped inside of them. Maybe it’s even versions of me in different places? Who knows. I sure as hell don’t. All I know is that if I don’t put these vivid hallucinations to paper they haunt me.

When I confessed the same thought to my husband he just smiled and told me in the nicest possible way I should probably pop out from the rabbit hole for a little bit. So here I am, sticking my head up for air and writing the sort of thing that would have had me thrown in bedlam for you to read.

I recently finished the first draft of what is ostensibly a hedonistic vampire mafia romance book. I mined some of my memories from my twenties that I spent running with a certain group of people in London (not Mafia, but certainly hedonistic), and somewhere between the second chapter and the 90k word mark I felt completely, and utterly depressed.

Not because I didn’t like the story or the characters or the vibe I’d created (imagine Blade meets The Gentlemen with a side of Saltburn), but because every-time I came up for air I was reminded that I am not, young, dumb and running around London with a hot vampire. I am a firmly 30 something millennial sat on my sofa vividly hallucinating while I type like a maniac for hours straight and forget to even hydrate myself. If it wasn’t for my dog I think I would slowly become a part of my furniture.

I don’t know what it is — I wouldn’t survive a day in the types of novels I’ve been writing (usually they’re fantasy… this romance was a stark departure from the norm… a throw back to my teenage years I spent writing fanfics that were somewhere between Twilight and The Godfather.) but the emotional whiplash I get when I finish writing, when I have to step out of the world I’ve created and back into this one is akin to how I imagine a come down feels (the closest I have experienced is hangxiety).

Why would I want to be in the real world when I can hang out with my imaginary friends instead?

Unless I decide to look at the news and trigger an existential crisis, the world feels dull, lifeless… void of anything, it’s like I poured myself into those pages even though I don’t always recognise much of me within them, and I’m like a vassal. Empty at my desk, thumbs aching from smashing the space bar too many times to count. The emotional whiplash is CONSIDERABLY worse when I write in first person POV.

Clearly — I’m having some sort of parasocial relationship with these fictional characters. I love them, I really do, and I hate them too — I wrote one villainous character I couldn’t stand so much that writing them actually annoyed me… I loved them all the more for it. My brain has built an attachment to people who will never exist beyond the limits of what I can write for them and it feels real because the brain can’t really tell the difference unless I tell it to, and this makes stepping away from them feel like grief. And trust me, I know grief.

I reached out to my amazingly talented friend who definitely is Not Peter Thiel and asked her if she experienced anything similar with her work—it turns out I am not alone in feeling this way. She said “with screenplays I get a sense of relief because there’s usually some kind of deadline. But the space of writing a novel is so all consuming, leaving it behind even for a couple of weeks is torturous. I start to miss my best friends.” - Jess R.

The novelist Charles Yu said something about the loss of the imagined ideal. Finishing means the book you’d dreamed of becomes the actual, imperfect thing on the page — he described losing the potential of what the book could have been, since the imagined ideal solidifies into something far from that ideal, and also losing the time spent alone with it.

I looked deeper into this feeling in order to self diagnose myself, like any self respecting millennial who grew up with Dr Google would do. And apparently it’s a thing… I mean, I sort of figured it was a thing from my time spent studying literature and art that I could not be alone — artists (and I count myself as one of them, and I’m including the entire spectrum) are not, for the most part the most well adjusted people history has given us. Throw in being a full fledged member of the March born Pisces gang and my husband has one hell of a treat in me. Thank God he’s a Scorpio.

This is a well observed phenomena in actors. It’s called de-roling — and yes, actors have a whole vocabulary for the thing I’ve apparently been doing to myself with no training and zero aftercare.

Turns out professional actors are more prone to depression and anxiety — go figure. Studies using Stanislavski-trained actors found they score higher on dissociation scales than non-actors — high enough, in some cases, to bump up against the clinical cut-off used for dissociative disorders. Not because acting makes you unhinged, but because the job is to relive something that feels real enough to generate real emotion, inside a situation your body knows is fake. That’s controlled depersonalisation. And it’s — you know, a profession skill that actors spend years training. I didn’t realise that I was doing it unlicensed, at my desk hopped on fumes because I forgot to eat somewhere between my second and fourteenth hour writing.

Somewhere along the third or fourth post writing melancholic episode I realised I need to do something, because let’s face it… it is not healthy to mourn a made up world, I’ll leave that hangover for my readers.

There’s a concept researchers call duality — the idea that well-adjusted actors keep a small, quiet part of themselves standing slightly outside the character even while they’re fully in it. A sort of internal chaperone. It’s described as a protective mechanism, the thing that stops you from actually losing yourself in the role. And the actors who cope best aren’t the ones who never go deep — they’re the ones who have a release strategy for coming back out. Which, my dear reader, I did not have. I had a Word document (actually I use pages and notebooks and my notes app… and scrivener and anything really because I’m a chaotic writing gremlin), a bag of Katje’s vegan gummy bears (they taste like Percy Pigs), and profound personal betrayal that I would never, in fact, be whisked off my feet by a hot vampire into a world I’d likely survive the grand sum of five minutes.

So if you, like me, have accidentally been Method Acting your own novel with no de-role plan — here’s what’s helped me… maybe, I don’t know, it will help you too…

How to survive the comedown:

• Do something physical the second you finish. Actors use this to signal to the body that the scene is over. A walk, a shower, hoovering in a rage — anything that isn’t sitting in the exact spot you just spent the last four hours in.
  

• Write in a journal. Just a few lines, first person, present tense, about your actual Tuesday or whatever day it is. It re-draws the line between you and them.
  

• Debrief the character like you’re gossiping about them, not being them. “God, she was a mess” not “I am a mess.” Distance disguised as bitchiness works surprisingly well. Have an imaginary conversation with your fans (they can be real or not lol) or answer a Q&A about your characters and book that take you out of the characters head and back into the creators (i.e. you).
  

• Expect it to hit harder in first person. You’re not imagining that part — the deeper the embodiment, the deeper the withdrawal.
  

• Let the body crash if it needs to. The sleep debt and adrenaline dip are real, not just narrative flair.

• Tell someone. Seriously, don’t suffer in silence. Maybe your friend who is voracious reader…They’re likely suffering from an emotional hangover too — it’s probably why we have people fighting so passionately over fan theories online because the parasocial relationship doesn’t end between the writer and the characters.

I was deep into a romantasy series when the inevitable miscommunication trope so beloved of readers everywhere under the age of sixteen (myself included), reared its ugly head and I was forced to suffer through 300+ pages of something that could have been solved with a fully developed prefrontal cortex and a cup of tea — and it got me thinking…

Who the f*ck is this book for anyway?

Because the smut is smutting, the actual theme of the book is fun, but the characters… why do they read like they’re still in school? Suffice it to say, I dnf’d the series. If I had been 15, I probably would have torn through it in a weekend and been a fully fledged stan, but as a 30 something year old… no.

So who, and I genuinely need to know, are these romantasy books aimed at? Because they’re starting to feel a bit weird. Why am I finding some of these books in the YA section and others in the rest of the store? Why are teenage girls marrying 500 year old men? Why are teenage girls leading immortals? Why are they having babies when they have ETERNITY to do so? Why, with such adult themes, written by adults, clearly meant for adults, are they teenage girls at all? Is it because the publishing industry needs to measure everything by the same capitalistic growth mindset that’s seeped its claws into every caveat of life to the point where a book must be marketed to the largest possible audience whether appropriate or not? Are we as women, so far down the rabbit hole of being treated like shite, that adult women can’t simply like books about women being loved, cherish, adored, who are not teenagers?

Or maybe it’s just that romantasy is increasingly becoming formulaic?

Don’t get me wrong. I do not need every book I pick up to be 500+ pages of esoteric writing so convoluted and experimental that I need to fall back on my English Literature Degree (the one I never bothered to finish because I started a business instead… it was peak GirlBoss era.) to understand what I’m reading. I’m very happy to slam the five star review button for a book that was — by all measurable standards, mid at best — because I had fun reading it. Reading is subjective, but since when did that become an excuse for the glut of cookie-cutter Netflix style novels hitting our shelves recently. All surface and little depth.

I’m not blaming the writer — there are a lot of well written cookie-cutter novels. I’m blaming the industry. I’m blaming the powers that be who forced the writer to age down their protagonist (but keep the smut…) so they can market it as a crossover, then cut and slash and hack away at their novel until it reads as a perfectly acceptable rendition of the ‘Saves the Cat’ formula. It’s a good formula, but does it have to be the only one?

Maybe its the novels I’m picking up — of course it’s the novels I’m picking up, there are thousands to choose from and I have a terrible habit of picking a book based on its cover, but I’m getting a little tired of the same formula. Girl with loud mouth that’s malnourished hates wearing dresses and falls in love with a depressed fairy prince, somehow along the way overcomes some challenges reminiscent of the hunger games and emerges as leader of the free world… she’s gone through nothing that would garner her any credentials to be such a leader, but somehow these — mostly 300+ year old men — fall to their knees and let her lead because she… I don’t know, is not like other girls. I’m not saying I don’t enjoy these books. I do… I have even written something similar… only the FMC is 200+ and likes dresses and the MMC has a past worthy of his age. I just don’t want every single one I pick up to be so similar.

There’s something strange with romantasy, it’s as if the publisher is trying their very best to appeal to absolutely everyone they can possibly get without asking who the book is actually for?

Why for instance am I reading graphic scenes about a girl who’s barely hit her twenties… if at all… and yet can f*ck like a porn star? I’m sorry but is this novel aimed at teenagers or adult women? And if it’s aimed at adult women why does the girl always have to have an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex?

Why does the 500 year old love interest always have to have been a weird loner for their entire existence (here’s looking at you Edward Cullen…and yes, I was team Edward!), and then suddenly comes out of his shell because SHE’S JUST NOT LIKE OTHER GIRLS! Maybe… just maybe he could have shagged around… maybe he’s got a messy breakup that taught him how to not be a dick in future, a divorce. I don’t know, they’re 500+ years old and they’ve had the grand sum of experience of a 20 year old? Ok, granted, in a world where you don’t die time might move a little slower, but come on? Where’s the messy reality of having eons of time on your hands?

I try to avoid these cliches in my novels… not because I think I’m better than anyone else, I’m really not… but because I’m a thirty year old and if my FMC is going to f*ck like a porn star, she’s going to have some experience under her belt… not be a wall-flower until the MMC goes down on her and she discovers some inner Linda Lovelace floundering beneath the surface of her stabby personality.

As for the formula. I know why it works, we reach for comfort, we search for meaning, we don’t want to be surprised. Only… from what I can tell scrolling through accounts that aren’t optimising for the algorithm that doesn’t seem to be the case. The books that stand out can still follow a formula but they’re weird, or well written, or deeply…deeply focused on one strange aspect… or they just have adults doing adult things… ground breaking in the world of romantasy.

I digress. Where was I… oh yes, who are these books for?

Maybe the honest answer is that romantasy isn’t aimed at anyone in particular — it’s aimed at a demographic, and demographics don’t need a fully developed prefrontal cortex or a coherent character arc. They just need to buy the book. I don’t have a neat solution here, just an increasingly specific list of tropes I need a break from.

So what, if anything, can you garner from my ramblings. Not much, because I don’t have an answer just an ever growing curiosity into the world of publishing as I too… try and fight my way in to it. But one thing I don’t feel like compromising on is my FMC’s age. I write for women — women like me, who want the smut and the fantasy and the swoony immortal love interest, without having to pretend a teenager with the emotional depth of a teaspoon is who we’re supposed to see ourselves in. If that’s a niche, fine. I’ll take the niche. At least she’ll have some experience under her belt — and so will he…

And, if by chance, some curious teenager wants to read my books under the covers with a torch the way we used to with mummy’s dog-eared copy of Jilly Cooper, that’s on them. Wasn’t there something devilishly delightful about discovering Wattpad, fan fiction, and smut when you certainly shouldn’t have? It felt like a rite of passage… especially for those of us who grew up to write our own.