Catmachine

Self-help books as a genre tend not to have a good reputation as even before you open the cover of some of them there’s always a whiff of making a fast buck about it and once you get inside you find yourself flicking the pages over and over faster and faster. “Yep… knew that… yes, I know… yep… stating the bleedin’ obvious…” What a lot of them boil down to is writing common sense down and identifying the problem. That's all very well and good but most of the time I know full well what the problems I’m experiencing are, there’s nothing mysterious, no cathartic epiphanies to be had. I realise what the issue is but doing something about it is another matter (sometimes even if I kind of know what the solution is). This is why I've never found CBT particularly useful - it actually increases my anxiety. What to Do When You Can’t Move Chapter one: Check whether you’re trapped inside a collapsed building. If you are, then the reason you can’t move is because you’re trapped inside a coll...

Some of this may cover similar ground to parts of blog entries I've written here in the past but none of them quite combine the topics in this order so I thought it was worth tweaking this short piece (originally written as an update for Unbound) and making it available here. Oddly, considering the subject of my debut novel Comeback, I never thought I would end up writing Fantasy novels, Urban or otherwise. When I was younger and first expressed ambition in the direction of writing professionally, I was convinced I'd write Science Fiction. This was partly because that was what I'd mainly been reading in adulthood up until that point. And yet the majority of the genre writing I enjoyed as a child was fantasy. I can't quite remember what the first novel I read was but do remember reading C S Lewis's Narnia and Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books quite early on. Other favourites included Richard Carpenter's two Catweazle novels, Paul Gallico's Jennie and - to a...