
Train Travel for Writers
You. Yeah you, with the pen. If you like writing, and haven’t yet been introduced to the wonderful world of Amtrak, here’s everything you need to know. (FYI, this is for America only. You Europeans have a whole different world of public transport.) First of all, if you’re imagining an airplane-like situation, forget it. For long trips, Amtrak will put you on one of the double decker trains, and they’re wonderfully designed. The seats have more legroom than you know what to

Killing Your Darlings
There comes a time in every writer’s life when they will be told: “Kill your darlings.” It’s not an instruction to axe off your favorite characters, but rather to destroy huge chunks of your hard work for the benefit of the manuscript. It's all about word count. One of the toughest obstacles, in my opinion, novelists must face. Let’s take a second to put word count into perspective. Remember high school, and the dreaded 5 paragraph essay? That was roughly 500 words. Probabl