Sometimes it seems hard to believe that today’s young writers are following the same vocation as that depicted by a long night of wakefulness in Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise (1938), when the tortured would-be writer lies awake all night hearing the bells sound off the hours – or is it the decades? – and all too soon eight o’clock approaches, and the magnum opus is still not written. Of all the afflictions of the old school, surely the most entrenched and significant was procrastination. Anyone can procrastinate, of course – anyone with a tendency to perfectionism and a horror

They say that novel writing is a lonely business and all that — well, yeah, if we wanted to make it a party, we’d probably go into advertising or screenwriting or something. However, there are times when you want to write with someone else. The good news is that collaborative software has come a long way. The bad news is it’s for the Mac only (this is a problem for us as we’re multi-systemal). We’ve used SubEthaEdit for brainstorming first drafts of business documents with the husband — it provides an opportunity to correct spelling and deleting his ideas in

Or maybe Los Angeles is one of the more terrifying towns. We often get this stuff mixed up. J-Fly (who’s un-on hiatus, and if we’d been playing more and working less, we’d know this) has decided to try a novel writing class at UCLA. We’ve done that, right down to the unfortunate runny nose (our conveniently timed allergy attack had a nice woman in a striped dress moving her desk away inch-by-inch. She never returned to class.). Based on our research, there are a few types who take these classes: earnest souls who really, really want to be published writers