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We know it can be intimidating to take the first step towards writing that book you keep promising yourself you will. You might find yourself staring at a blank page imagining the first word you [...]

In a little more than a month, we will be hunting for truffles in Istria during the course of our Croatian writing retreat. It’ll demand a keen sense of smell, I imagine – although I’m pretty [...]

I’m still entangled in the wilds of The Magic Mountain. I learned during a break in my hectic reading schedule that a lexical analysis of the original German version of the book revealed that the [...]

I’m sometimes asked how long a novel should be. I begin by talking about the length of various pieces of string, but then, after a little humming and hawing say something like this: Somewhere [...]

We’ve just spent three days with friends in a remote village in the Klein Karoo. We were alerted to the plague of fieldmice they’re experiencing when a solitary mouse emerged surreptitiously from [...]