Reading time: 0.56 220 words Read this email in your browser. Hey Reader, It was sunny out, but I was inside, in the dining room, burrowed under the table in a pile of cushions. The long tablecloth formed a den around me and my book. Nothing existed outside the little patch of light from my torch, which is why I didn’t notice my parents mobilising the neighbourhood to look for me. While the grownups grew increasingly frantic, I disappeared into my story. Stepping through the book and into the...
2 days ago • 1 min read
Reading time: 2.10 512 words Read this email in your browser. Hey Reader, Stop using the yoghurt brand method to define your audience, please for the love of Odin. I know what you’ve been told: NICHE NICHE NICHE! Niche so hard you need a candle and a shrine to the madonna. Niche until you end up with Sandra. She’s 38 years old, lives in a town, married with two children aged under 10, has a dog, wants to lose some weight so she can strut around in last year’s LBD, loves avocado toast and an...
3 days ago • 2 min read
Reading time: 3.12 758 words Read this email in your browser. Hey Reader, “Using ChatGPT can rot your brain!” “ChatGPT is making people dumber!” “ChatGPT use significantly reduces brain activity!” ^^ Scary headlines, right? They’re supposed to be. That’s how headlines work. But they’re not the full story. There’s a study out of MIT that everyone seems to be talking about at the moment called “Your Brain on ChatGPT” and we need to talk about it too. It’s making everyone ask: “Will AI destroy...
4 days ago • 3 min read
Reading time: 1.52 441 words Read this email in your browser. Hey Reader, Let’s not stay on the safe side. “Just to be on the safe side” is the embarrassing cousin of “bide your time,” “good things come to those who wait,” and “be grateful for what you’ve got.” And of all of those phrases, “be grateful for what you’ve got” is the big daddy. It says get back in your box. It warns don’t you dare hope for anything more. It whispers who do you think you are, getting too big for your boots? So we...
5 days ago • 2 min read
Reading time: 4.19 1,025 words Read this email in your browser. Hey Reader, When I was at school, I didn’t really have friends. I had a stamp collection. I hovered on the periphery like a weird little moth, waiting to be invited in — to parties, to sports teams, to life. The library was my playground and I ate most of my lunches there, lurking in the stacks with my Marmite sandwiches and my Penguin biscuit and my apple and my wet wipes for my sticky fingers, shrinking myself into corners,...
8 days ago • 5 min read
Reading time: 1.02 243 words Read this email in your browser. Hey Reader, Do you know what these hieroglyphs mean? Scholars translated them as, “How beautiful are thy buttocks!” But it was actually pronounced: “Nice butt, Phar-bro!” I studied archaeology and ancient history at uni. I learned to read hierolyphs — and dabbled a little in ancient Sumerian and Babylonian, plus a little ancient Rome and Greek. Most of that knowledge has leaked out of my brain now but one thing stuck with me:...
9 days ago • 1 min read
Reading time: 0.46 180 words Read this email in your browser. Hey Reader, The people I help with their book always want to know more about my frameworks. I don’t want to call them templates because that gives the impression that every book is going to be the same. They’re not. The frameworks I created mean that nobody has ever been stuck looking at that blank page and being like “I literally don’t know what to do next.” I’ve got a bunch of them for different aspects of the book. I’ve made...
10 days ago • 1 min read
Reading time: 544 218 words Read this email in your browser. Hey Reader, “What on earth can you possibly write every single day that isn’t AI slop and isn’t just drivel after 3 days?” ^^ This was a comment on Katie Skelton’s LinkedIn post last week. She was talking about writing daily emails to her email list. (Katie is a massive email weirdo and teaches people all about email marketing and I think she’s fab — give her a follow. I’ve been sending more-or-less weekdaily emails since 2014 so I...
11 days ago • 3 min read
Reading time: 1.53 446 words Read this email in your browser. Hey Reader, I wanna be adored. (gold star to you if you get the song reference) We all want to be adored, right? Especially those of us who are performers in one way or another. Which is why, as often as possible, I put myself on a stage and deliberately try to make strangers laugh. But actually, being adored isn’t the point; it just feels that way until the magic happens. What we really want is to make a connection: to see and be...
12 days ago • 2 min read