It took me an embarassingly long time to work this out: conflict is everything.

Do you know what happened to the first story I wrote once I worked it out? When I first focused on deliberately working it into every paragraph? It won WotF.

If you only ever take one piece of advice from me, take this: you need more conflict.

Happy days! My first ever audio production is available today as PodCastle episode 427, brilliantly narrated by Louise Ratcliffe with a proper Lancashire accent.

If you're here from PodCastle, then firstly--hi! Thank you for remembering to look me up after you finished listening. That's quite something, and it means a lot. The artwork mentioned in the show notes is on the right, by the incredibly talented Adrian Massaro. It honestly gave me shivers the first time I saw it.

Being a writer, I'm full of self-importance and arrogantly believe everyone wants to read pages and pages of nonsense from me. As such, I'm going to start a series about my Golden Pen story from Writers of the Future volume 32, Squalor & Sympathy, dissecting it from various angles.

First up: all the historical accuracies and references in the story.

Kobo Writing Life very kindly asked me to pen a guest post covering my experiences of the Writers of the Future week, and being me, I ended up writing 3000 words, so it had to be split in two. Both parts are up now: Part One and Part Two.

You can read the opening to my Golden Pen winning story, Squalor & Sympathy, and then trundle over to Writers of the Future to buy the anthology from your venue of choice.

Let's do a #WotF32 giveaway.

All you have to do is sign up for my newsletter in the next week--between now and launch day, May 3rd 2016--and I'll pick a name to get a signed copy on launch day. Anywhere in the world. That easy--I just want your email address, and I don't even ask you to type it twice to check your spelling. I actually couldn't make it easier.

For reference, I have had that mailing list for two months and not sent a damn thing out on it. This isn't a lot of spam you're signing up for.

So this happened.

Not only that, but my illustrator, Adrian Massaro, won the Golden Brush award--the first time in contest history that one story has won both awards.