Tim Clare
@TimClarePoet
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THE GAME CHANGERS - out Nov. Author of THE HONOURS, THE ICE HOUSE & COWARD. Presents DEATH OF 1000 CUTS. Support me:
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My loves, my darlings. If you like my work & are interested to read my new book, The Game Changers: How Games Changed The World & Can Change You To, please can I nudge you to preorder via the link below, which helps me a lot while guaranteeing you a copy:
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Oh dear. I can feel the buzz wearing off. I need another resignation to keep me going. Used to be just the one could get me through a whole week. Now I need a couple a day to get the same high
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I'm doing some reading about Georgian London & the most shocking thing I've found is some people drank something called 'Twist' which was... half-coffee, half-tea.
WHAT THE FUCK, THE PAST
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I love April 1st. One morning a year, all of Britain comes together in critically evaluating news articles before accepting them as true.
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I used to like SF but then lit fic taught me the only legitimate art is middle-class straight ppl having a very slow divorce
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@_ChristinaRoss
This feels like someone filtering prospects for full-on abuse. Like, actively hunting for someone prepared to accept getting every single aspect of themselves criticised, who's likely to be easy to control. Horrible.
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Got 'gender critical feminists' in my mentions saying they 'can't wait' til my 2 year old daughter is sexually assaulted. Just in case you were wondering what kind of feminism transphobes practise.
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@bad_takes
@steinkobbe
Spent fifteen minutes tapdancing in the STD clinic waiting room. Not even a smattering of applause
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Ok, ok. 1 Like = 1 interesting magic system / cost for casting magic. I don't guarantee that all of these will be original as this is pretty well-trodden territory, but they'll certainly be made up on the spot by me.
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I made a free 8-week writing course for all experience levels. Each day you listen to an episode & do the 10 min exercise. It's designed to reset your writing habits & mindset while teaching you new skills. Signal boosts appreciated!
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My unpopular opinion about book festivals, based on 20-odd years of attendance, is that the most prominent are mostly an affirmation of the status quo - a chance for middle-class people to get subsidised access to authors who already have big platforms on TV & radio.
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All that money on a posh education & he connects two independent clauses with a comma splice.
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@pixelatedboat
I'd gradually introduce a character called 'Jim Davis' while phasing out Garfield. Initially bewildered, 'Jim Davis' comes to understand he's trapped inside a comic strip. Meanwhile, I'd begin dressing in a Garfield costume 24/7
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(although I do like the expression 'Vice Admiral of the Narrow Seas' which is for someone who gets so drunk they urinate under the table into their companions' shoes. Relatable)
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Something that's been consuming me for the past few days is: if you put 100 humans on a desert island with their memories wiped, how long would it be before they invented Ludo? It's
#AutismAcceptanceMonth
so you actually have to hear me out on this. Ok:
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So basically the protocol is: get behind whoever in your constituency is the biggest rival left of the Tories. Back them. Suck it up.
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Guys, I made an 8 week online fiction writing course. It only takes 10 minutes a day, there's a daily podcast to guide you & time your writing. It's free. It's the COUCH TO 80K WRITING BOOT CAMP & I'd appreciate it if you'd share as widely as you can:
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@pixelatedboat
"The mission of the muncher, the Lemon, is to chomp its way through all the dots on the labyrinth. It is chased and ambushed by the four PacMen... I myself have spent weeks in a PacMan fed stupor, unwilling and unable to think about anything else."
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MORAL AXIOMS
1. It is always right to punch a fascist.
2. It is always right to draw a cock and balls on a Tory politician's face.
Many thanks to the thuggish Left in my constituency, demonstrating to voters why we shouldn't let nasty protest groups near Government.
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Sometimes I think of all the scenes I don't know about, & how someone can be hyperfamous in one area & anonymous to everyone else, & it blows my mind. Like I could be waiting for my bubble tea standing beside MC Chucklefuck, Marquis of Clownstep, & I'd never know
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I'm a bit bewildered by the kookier parts of ND Twitter, where people take some completely normal human experience & claim it's an exclusive symptom of ADHD or autism.
'Autistic people hate being kicked in the balls. This is called Noxious Gonadal Kinetic Stimulus Dysphoria.'
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Just read an incredible 13th Century account of a feudal uprising where a duke's son was killed by rebels who used a trebuchet to knock him off the battlements with the only available ordnance: a peasant's decapitated head. Apparently it was the first serf-face-to-heir missile.
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My dad has roped me into playing a diabolically-bad-looking boardgame where you have to try to buy a car & a working telephone in East Germany. There's a hidden role mechanic where one player might be the Stasi. & a lengthy bureaucratic process for getting your vehicle registered
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Hey authors with a book/s out that might make a good Xmas gift, can you @ reply with title, what it's about & a purchase link? It's not self-promo bcos I'll be RTing, & we should normalise being proud of our work. Writers gotta eat this festive season. This year give stories!
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So I somewhat rashly said for every transphobe harassing me that I block today I'd donate a quid to
@Mermaids_Gender
- just counted up my block list. 286 new entries! Yikes. Well. I've stuck to my word. Thank you to all the people who used multiple accounts to help raise more!
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There once was a girl called Theresa
Whose ministers failed to please her
She went on the attack:
'The UK's got my back.'
But it's holding a knife, and she's Caesar
#WorldPoetryDay
#brexit
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I don't know if you're familiar with novelty dice game Pass the Pigs. I used to play it with my family a lot - we liked dice games. I've been reading a paper called 'Pig Data & Bayesian Inference on Multinomial Probabilities' & I was shocked by some of its findings.
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My favourite type of internet spat is when someone asks something literally no one has ever cared about like 'should the fried egg be at the edge of the plate or in the centre?' & 250 comments down 2 days later someone's being called a French war crimes denialist
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Lots of folks sharing articles on my social media with comments like 'humanity is doomed' or similarly bleak takes. Why post, then? Why spread pain & apathy & a sense of helplessness? You're being a foot soldier for the very forces of fear & hatred you want to stop.
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Can I just say, if you write, whether just for yourself or you've put out 20+ bestsellers, you're part of the gang. Most authors I encounter don't see a pecking order. The few who do (I'm sure they exist) are being silly. You have more in common with your Big Faves than you know.
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Today I told my 2-year-old daughter that I make stories for a living. She looked at me a bit amazed for a bit, then said: 'I could come to work with you & bring my colour pencils.' I don't think there's anything I'd love to do more in the world than work on a story with her.
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@pixelatedboat
The Weetabix website had a bit in its FAQ about the maximum safe number of Weetabix you can eat in a day. They declined to give an upper number but wrote that beyond a certain limit you don't have room for balanced nutrition. But apparently this question is asked 'frequently'?
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If you had to pick one British person to swear allegiance to next Saturday, who would you pick?
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My 5 year old was watching Newsround & I worried she would be frightened by the war. She turned to me, confused, & said: 'Poo tin? There's someone called poo tin?' I said yes & she screamed with laughter. She can't believe it. To her it's like he's called President Ivan Shitbag.
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Um. Holy crap. The new
@MarlonJames5
Fantasy novel BLACK LEOPARD, RED WOLF just dropped through my door. With a rave quote from
@neilhimself
. Right. Getting daughter down for her nap then diving in. That cover illustration is awesome.
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Yesterday my apprentice (9) was wounded & I was studying a grimoire so I said over my shoulder 'summon Bifrons, bind him to your will & demand healing'. He said 'How?' like all students when they want YOU to do it, so I said: 'Use a seal.' He brought me the seal: 'Use it how?'
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Ok, I'll try this: 1 like = 1 unusual condition for killing the big baddy at the end of your book/movie/game
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Ok, since it's Christmas. 1 Like = 1 completely open-source opening for an imaginary novel. Feel free to steal for the bestseller you start writing in the New Year.
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Was asked to leave the library after standing on table & yelling 'BOOKS CAN FUCK OFF' at patrons. This stifling of debate has a chilling effect on free thought & has no place in a liberal democracy. Freedom of speech means sometimes hearing what you don't want to hear. Furthermor
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Look at your bodies, women! Piles of them. Carnal. Mouldering. MORTIFICA THE SLUMBERLESS, HANDMAIDEN OF ______, WHOSE NAME IS FORFEIT chose you for the magnificent job of creating & nourishing new unlife! What can be more important than this?!?!
Look at your bodies, women! Breasts, ovaries, and a womb. God created you for the magnificent job of creating and nourishing new life! What can be more important than this?!?!
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It's
#AutismAcceptanceWeek
- I just want to say that I am autistic. I was diagnosed at 40. I have not talked about it on here or on my podcast because I wasn't ready. I'm still not sure I am. But part of acceptance is accepting yourself, I guess. I still struggle with that. Hi.
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Hey pals. So. That news I've been enigmatically gesturing towards.
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Trying & failing to quit social media atm, so let me use my current lapsed state to say - starting Jan 1st I'm launching a new, free, 100 Day Writing Challenge podcast. It'll be 100 daily writing exercises, by podcast, each one taking 10 mins. It'll be like Couch to 80k 2.0.
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Like, one would have thought, at a minimum, in a book that purports to offer both cultural analysis & tactical insight, that the author would be able to identify which of the sprites shown below is Pac-Man. Not so Amis!
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Last night, after we put my daughter to bed, we went downstairs to look at the Xmas tree one last time before taking it down today. Then I went upstairs to do some writing, & I came across something in my grandmother's memoirs that stopped me short. I want to share it.
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Sonic fandom is an absolutely incredible social phenomenon. They're like post-Great Disappointment Millerites. Their god died decades ago & their priests went insane. Now they worship uncanny effigies built entirely from trauma & horniness.
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Um. Big announcement? My new book, COWARD: Why We Get Anxious & What We Can Do About It, is out next May from
@canongatebooks
. It's a book about anxiety & panic, that digs into the latest science, looking for answers. It's the most personal thing I've ever written.
.
@canongatebooks
has acquired Coward: Why We Get Anxious & What We Can Do About It, a personal guide and exploration to rethinking and living with anxiety by
@TimClarePoet
. Discover more here:
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Today would have been JRR Tolkien's 127th birthday. He obviously has a huge legacy for Fantasy authors like me, & successive movements in Fantasy have largely sought to define themselves by how they're not Tolkien. New Weird, Grimdark, whatever we're doing now. I have thoughts!
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@KatyMontgomerie
We don't have double blind studies for using psychedelics for depression - it's obviously impossible for participants not to know they're floridly hallucinating - but many newspapers report research on them as convincing & evidence they should be widely adopted.
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Found out my wife has her first jab on Monday. Thrilled. I asked my daughter if she knew what that meant. Suki said 'it gives the good bits in your body some practice'. Which is an awesome summary of vaccines.
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How many of your events have free entry? How many headline underrepresented authors? How are you involving the local community? (schools visits, local authors, etc) How are you making your events accessible to people who don't often go to book events & how are you reaching them?
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So many authors talk about the professionalisation of writing being about setting a schedule & writing when you don't want to. But all my best work has come from writing when I *did* want to, when I was driven & engaged. It arose from play & goofing off, not obligation.
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@MooseAllain
Like all your best work, this is both brilliant & makes me sort of shake my fist in delighted outrage
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The identity of the author who wrote a novel is, fundamentally, none of your fucking business. They don't have an obligation to share their life story with you, to forego their privacy, to perform their wounds, to offer up trauma so you can judge whether it's sufficient.
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Radical politics aren't inherently moral. Moral good comes from having compassionate politics. It's just that, under our current systems, a politics based on humanity, protecting the vulnerable, & caring for each other & the planet happens to be radical.
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Honestly a great resolution for 2020 is learning how to read the original studies quoted in pop science articles. I started checking footnotes in psychology books I read this year, & the number of times the study doesn't show what the author claims it does.
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@pixelatedboat
It's just like how, in Asteroids, you must pilot your asteroid around breaking the various ships into smaller ships
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I started this decade a poet, ended a novelist. Started a heavy drinker, ended teetotal. Started an omnivore, ended veggie. Started a bf, ended a husband & dad. Started depressed, ended anxious(ish). Thought sometimes I wouldn't make it. Made it. x
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@ChuckWendig
Here in England we prefer the original spelling of Gough Dhammet, a small village near York from which the first profanities were crafted & barrel-aged by monks.
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Do you know what I like? I like when, on the copyright page of a book, the publisher says what font the book was typeset in. When I see that, I nod like a waiter at a guest's wine selection. 'Ah, Garamond. That will pair well with this story of domestic claustrophobia in space.'
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Reading a lot about dictators and I'm struck by how often a narrative of 'brutal but effective' is uncritically accepted and propagated by their opponents. The ethics of their methods are questioned, but rarely the story they tell about the efficacy of those methods.
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If you buy books this Xmas, please consider buying anywhere but Amazon. Last year they paid £1.7m tax on £2bn turnover in the UK. They've received repeated reprimands for tax evasion. All that money stolen from hospitals, schools, the welfare state, roads, the arts.
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Guess what: if the planet turns to a smouldering hellscape of glassy slag in the next hundred years, no fucker's going to be sitting in the ruins with a printout of your FB timeline going 'Well, respect to Brian, he called it.'
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Top 10 Writing Tips:
1. You can't.
2. Condense writing.
3. Into 'tips'.
4. Anymore than you can.
5. Learn to drive.
6. From 'driving tips'.
7. You have to do it.
8. An instructor or friend can help.
9. Writing tips are just.
10. Authors showing off.
#writingtips
#amwriting
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A lot of creative writing 'career' advice assumes a fairly normal brain, reasonable amounts of money & that you happen to be writing what other folks want to read. So when you try to follow it & can't, you assume the problem is you & give up. Consider other possibilities.
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I made a free 8-week fiction writing course by podcast. Daily 10 min exercises to prep you for finishing your novel from an experienced teacher. It's for all levels, beginner to pro. Resets your habits, makes writing fun again. Shares appreciated!
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Nearly 3 years ago I was having panic attacks every week that pinned me to the floor, screaming. It had been going on for over a decade. I was grindingly anxious. I wanted to get better for my daughter. This book, out today, is the result of the year I spent searching for a cure.
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It's fine to meet that demand but if you run events like that you don't get to do special pleading that you're a rare & magical cultural space that needs to help launder the reputation of investors in arms & global warming so you can afford to book Rory Stewart
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I've started reading this, Martin Amis' book on golden age arcade games. It really is unutterably, toe-curlingly dreadful. It is also quintessentially Amis, but I repeat myself.
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My @ replies have once again become a shitshow of angry TERFs invoking 'biological reality' then abruptly dismissing science as a woke liberal conspiracy when pointed towards the latest, best data re neuroscience, gender, sex as a spectrum, etc. The mute list grows...
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Writers. Procrastination is a psychic immune response trying to protect you from feeling shit about yourself. The cure isn't to shame and bully yourself into writing. That's the cause. The cure is taking back your sovereignty by decoupling your self-worth from your output.
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Seeing lots of writers focusing on goals for 2020. My 2p worth: if you focus on goals you'll forever be dissatisfied & anxious. Goals are either in the past 'I achieved that' or in the future 'I must achieve that'. Writing - & life - is done & enjoyed in the present.
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The idea Tolkien had some rosy, patriotic, gilded conception of war is so far off as to make me actively furious. There's not a Grimdark author alive who has experienced half the hell he lived first-hand. How actually fucking dare you.
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On Tuesday morning, my second daughter was born. She is called Mimi. She came out of the ICU this morning. It has been a very intense week & we love her very much.
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My book about anxiety & how we can deal with it, COWARD, is out next year. One thing that was really important to me was that I did a good job with the science. Science isn't a storeroom of facts - it's a set of processes for stress-testing explanatory models. I wanted to.. (1/?)
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To my fellow anxiety & depression sufferers, today is worth noting as evidence that sometimes, the bad thing doesn't happen, no matter how grimly inevitable it felt. Sometimes, stuff goes better than you feared. That's powerful knowledge. Bank it. x
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In my experience, a lot of authors are scared of admitting to setbacks, disappointing sales, or self-doubt, for fear of the taint of failure becoming associated with their work. But the truth is, most writers will experience all of these things at some point, & most will hide it.
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For anyone thinking of doing a dry January, I've been teetotal for 9 & a half years now, having been a frequent & heavy drinker before that. If you feel like you'd like to try a break from alcohol, that's great. It may be worth tempering your expectations of temperance, however:
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Just played Chuckie Egg with my 2-year-old daughter at Norwich Games Festival (she did the jumps) on a BBC Micro & honestly felt myself tearing up. Takes me back to being a lonely little nerd. Wish I could show him this now. & his incredible daughter. Look. We made it.
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If you're stuck at home self-isolating I've uploaded 69 instalments of my 100 part free writing course. It's a series of exercises that take 10 mins a day, for fiction writers of all levels. I'm an author who has taught 1000s of writers:
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A lot of the BG controversy speaks to a wider issue of a literature world that wants the prestige of a protected cultural asset but programmes like a business. Successive governments have slashed investment in the Arts & private money always comes with big catches.
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@jameslsutter
Hey James. You might enjoy this ongoing thread of magic systems. Approaching 200 so far:
Ok, ok. 1 Like = 1 interesting magic system / cost for casting magic. I don't guarantee that all of these will be original as this is pretty well-trodden territory, but they'll certainly be made up on the spot by me.
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Just ran 18 miles, which is the farthest I've run, ever. Back in summer I could barely make 5k. I don't care about my time or anything. I'm just really, really proud of myself for working hard & doing something I never ever believed I could.
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Shout out to the retired lady who wrote to me this week saying she'd completed my writing course, but she doesn't plan on buying my books because I waffle too much, and she hasn't got long enough left.
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Hey, so tomorrow morning I'm quitting social media til 2020, as part of my big project to try to fix my poor mental health. I suffer from really bad - albeit intermittent - anxiety & panic, & often the internet gets to me. So for the purposes of the experiment, it has to go.
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On tour I've discovered there are still loads of writers who don't know about my free 8 week writing boot camp by podcast. It only asks for 10 mins of writing a day. It'll build your confidence, train you in key skills, & get you match fit for a novel:
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Love it when Americans say 'urbs' when they mean herbs. Brilliant. Don't know how they keep a straight face. Such commitment to the bit.
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You know I'm releasing a new free writing course starting on Jan 1st? The 100 Day Writing Challenge. Each short podcast has a 10 min exercise, including a timer. It's like the Couch to 80k course on steroids. Hoping to lift up more writers in 2020!
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