Kevin had a car in the US, but I never drove it.

Exactly this.

got the trust, they've already been touched by God (usually TV execs). So I wonder what it takes to convince the general reading public to take more risks on unknown voices, and what publishers could do to help with that, but more, how we can move away from divine choice and towards craft?

like we're inherently untrustworthy, that our base state is 'talentless hack'. We have to work our arses off to convince people to even just read a few of our words, let alone invest in a novel, or invest in us. And in this environment, of course celeb writers thrive because they've already...

...writers more stability? I've been thinking about this for months if not years, and I think there could be, but I don't think that there's enough trust in writers for anyone to take the risk it would require. And certainly not in the current economy. So writers continue to struggle, treated...

get lucky. For writers, everything is speculative, from the money you spend on courses or editors to the time you spend on writing to the hope you spend that one day God might choose you and you might just get lucky. But does it really have to be this way? Is there another model that would give...

spot the bandwagon and jump on it with slop, which puts the public off that trend.) Writers are also one of the few professions where you have to do all your professional development work yourself, up front. You have to do all your learning first, then write and perfect a book, and you might just...

consistent and they don't believe that the buying public can be consistent either. (Maybe they're not... but they're more consistent than publishers believe. We do tend to want more of the same, if it's good. I'd argue trends die out not because the public gets bored, but because publishers ...

successful, then you maybe just weren't worthy enough. And if you are, well, God might not choose you again. The entire publishing industry works on this model as a foundation, even if they don't recognise it. No publisher has 'in-house' writers, because they don't trust that writers can be...

are divinely inspired, touched by the hand of God and merely channeling a higher, divine communication. The writer in this model is a conduit for God, not capable in their own right. Writing isn't a craft to be learnt, it's something you do whilst you wait for God to choose you. If you aren't...

largely because society doesn't trust creativity or creatives. We don't believe that a writer who wrote a great book last year can write another next year. This is largely, I think, because of the Divine Model of Creativity, (closely related to the Great Man Model), the idea that good writers...

Writers, to stick with the eg, don't have a career ladder. You don't start writing flash fiction, progress to short stories, then novellas, novels and finally epics. You don't start with a small advance, then get a bigger advance and a bigger advance. Any writer's career is a series of flukes...

I found myself yesterday thinking about my five wild animals and then realised I was slipping into a very competitive mode of thought and stopped immediately.

Passed my test when I was 18, totalled my mum’s car 3 weeks later and developed a deep fear of driving, so really organised my life in such a way that I did not need to. Took lessons again a couple of years ago and am driving now, occasionally. Still don’t own a car but we are members of a car club.

Study shows wildcats could return to Devon 🐾
A two-year study by the South West Wildcat Project has found that reintroducing wildcats to mid-Devon is feasible — and that most local people support the idea. It envisages 40-50 animals being released, though not before 2027.

🧵4/5

Would love to hear a comic being asked “do you think you were phenomenally lucky to be able to build your reputation during a time that encouraged and rewarded creative freedom? And why do you think that stopped?” And NOT answer “humans outside my core audience started objecting to being bullied.”