Hello and welcome to Death Of 1000 Cuts, making you an awesome writer, one cut at a time. This is a blog about writing, reading and editing, where we look at ways of making stories better. Most weeks I take a novice author’s first page and look at what works and what could be improved. … Read more

I’ve noticed some handwringing over what genre to stick The Honours under. I appreciate the anxiety – taxonomy is important. Books are like Pokémon – they come in many types, each with different strengths and weaknesses, the more you own, the cooler you are, and the most popular ones are a bit shit. To save … Read more

Hello and welcome to Death Of 1000 Cuts – making you an awesome writer, one cut at a time. This is a blog for writers, readers and editors, about ways we can take fiction and make it better. The blog appears every Thursday, and most weeks we look at the first page from a novice … Read more

I’ve written previously about the tensions of writing a novel – specifically that process of mourning an old bit that wasn’t working, and the new growth that springs up in the aftermath, once the dead part has had a chance to mulch down. And I do think this is one of the most important attitudinal … Read more

Bonsoir et welcome to Death Of 1000 Cuts – making you an awesome writer, one cut at a time. Every Thursday this blog appears, giving you advice on writing and rewriting. In a couple of weeks, we will have been going two years! Christ. My debut novel, The Honours, came out on Thursday. It’s in … Read more

It’s my book birthday today. The Honours is finally released into the wild. It’s in shops. Yesssss. It occurred to me that, rather than farting on about myself and how I feel (spoiler: I feel good), it might be worth acknowledging that books don’t get written by one person. That’s a romantic myth. I had … Read more