Writing

Most Internet-savvy folks are already aware of MasterClass, an online-seminar platform that allows mere mortals to learn from people at the very top of their fields. Chef Thomas Keller may teach you how to make a sauce; Werner Herzog may teach you the ins and outs of camera lenses.  Read more

Like most authors who don't sell a million books a year, I have a day job. I've been a journalist since before personal computers. It's a fun gig that pays the bills but also a challenging one that limits time for making things up.  Read more

This week, I'm a guest on the Marginally podcast, which is about writing (or the creative life) when you also hold a day job. I immensely enjoyed the conversation with Olivia and Meghan, not least because it was free of the usual nuts-and-bolts of how to get published. Instead, we discussed the vexed issue of writing and money.

There is something exciting, but also terrifying, about creating a new series character - especially as I have been writing about my first detective, DCI Tom Douglas, for so many years.

Written into our culture is the idea of the writer as adventurer, or the writer as rake. It isn't enough that a person should strive to write interesting things. They ought also, we feel, to have an interesting life: to flash and yearn and travel intemperately, to artfully unspool (but how, I wonder, do they ever get anything done?).  Read more