Lost framed as something I did is perhaps an unkindness in this example. I didn’t lose them, not like I’ve lost countless umbrellas, forgotten in car foot wells or restaurants. No, I didn’t lose them, they left, leaving me to haunt the remnants of my first home – the one we chose and began to build together. The bookshelf in the living room is a continued symbol of this loss – a project begun and abandoned. Tools I don’t know how to use peek from cubby holes in a mockery of failed domesticity. Every day, the mismatch of plywood and black shelves, their irregularity mistaken by others for a quirky interior design choice. Reader, I am learning to live with this loss, but it’s so much harder than it needed to be.

Last weekend I turned thirty-six. A tipping over into the second half of adulthood with more losses than gains, if we’re tallying them up. When relationships end we risk losing faith in ourselves too. Self-esteem shaken, we abandon confidence in the knowledge that we are someone worth loving. Now I’m older and use more serums than seems sensible, I’m all-too aware that I’ve lost beauty, elasticity, the ability to stave off the effects of gravity. People have stopped seeing me as they once did – men’s eyes stare through me instead of into me. How funny that being a woman means this switch-up is both a relief and a cause for mourning, all at once.

‘To be seen—to be seen—is to be…penetrated,’1 Aunt Lydia evangelises in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. She means it as a warning, is preaching modesty whilst justifying the stifling handmaids’ uniforms. I don’t want to be penetrated either, but I do want to be perceived – to be really seen. My therapist tells me that being published will lead to a bigger kind of life, the world opening up after a long period of isolation. She’s not wrong. I recognise that despite my losses, there are already beautiful gains.

Because I was brave and started to attend an in-person exercise class, there are muscles in my legs and stomach that have slumbered for some time, newly raised by the Reformer Pilates I started up at Christmas. The other day I held my entire body weight on my forearms and raised a leg into the air in an acrobatic feat my poor chronically ill body said wasn’t possible and yet here we are. I own special socks for this purpose, fancy leggings too; my oxygen capacity is at 100% and the nurse said that’s probably better than her, like my claim to cancer is some complicated ruse for free scans and expensive medication.

Early readers of A Healthy Appetite have started to post their reviews, and through them, I’ve gained readers. Most profound of all, people have cared enough about my words to write paragraphs of insights and compliments and post them in places others will see them. It’s still early days. At the moment, I’m looking at reviews – call it morbid curiosity or masochism if you will – but I have taken more than I’ve lost reading them. Perhaps that will change when the book reaches wider audiences, but for now I’m tallying up those five stars like scores on a dart board and claiming an early victory.

I guess that’s life, not just being an author: a series of peaks a troughs, wins and losses, eventually evening itself out. For now I’ll try to focus on what I’m gaining in 2026: an audience, new friendships, and a bigger sense of the world that being chronically ill will sometimes feel like a pleasure and a curse all wrapped up together. But keep it all coming. Let me live this life of checks and balances for as long as this body will have me.

For prosperity, here’s one of the incredible early reviews I’ve gained since my arcs went out into the world. Maybe it will inspire you to press that magical pre-order button and I’ll gain another one of you too.

1

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. Random House, 1986

In other news…

You can support me at my first ever event celebrating Dead Ink’s 10 year anniversary. Tickets are available here.

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What I’m Watching

BEEF - Season 2, now streaming on Netflix

Put Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan in it and I’m going to watch it.

At the point of writing this, I haven’t quite finished, but can safely say it fits nicely into the vacuum left by season one. At it’s heart? A sizzling serving of beef. Characters gnawing at each other’s throats. Lovers becoming enemies, enemies becoming lovers and everything in between.

The premise? A Millennial couple, glitzy and gorgeous outwardly, but falling apart behind closed doors are set against a pair of Gen-Z hopefuls: financially struggling but sickeningly in love. When Austin and Ashley fumble into witnessing a violent altercation between Isaac and Mulligan’s characters they leave with evidence and promptly hatch a mercenary plan to secure promotion at the country club they’re both hired at - incidentally run by the very couple they have dirt on.

Without giving anything away, let’s just say it spirals way beyond this initial conflict, with rivalries splitting off and doubling into every which direction. There are so many delicious betrayals and power struggles I found myself flip-flopping between who I was rooting for. This is part of the fun.

This season has a touch of The White Lotus about it, but its serves up its own despicable story without compromising on originality. Some say it’s a step down in quality since season one, but I think we can let it stand in its own right, as a super watchable contribution to the anthology series.

4 ☆☆☆☆

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Current Reads 📚

A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing by Alice Evelyn Yang - out now with Dead Ink

‘Qianze has not seen her father in eleven years, since he walked out of her life the night of her fourteenth birthday and disappeared without a trace. But then she gets a call—there is a man on the porch of her childhood home, and he’s asking for her. This man isn’t the Ba Qianze remembers: he is much older, more fragile, and worst of all, haunted by a half-forgotten prophecy.’

Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing is one of those novels that stun you to silence when you finish it. In fact, I’m pretty sure I gasped out a ‘wow,’ before flicking straight back to the start to study the feat of structure and storytelling Yang has pulled off.

Told over three generations, the story spans not just years but the expansiveness of a whole lineage, stretching far beyond its pages. I was especially moved by Ming’s sections of the narrative (Qianze’s grandmother), which date back to 1920s China and then journey through to Japan’s invasion and its eventual surrender.

In areas of History little studied on the Western curriculum, the reader learns about the atrocities inflicted upon China’s people, including the sexual slavery of Comfort Women imprisoned by the Japanese Imperial Armed forces during WWII. In Ba’s sections, we learn about the origins of The Beast and its foreboding prophecy, spanning the period of Cultural Revolution under communism. These sections were especially hard to stomach, with Weihong’s indoctrination into violence rendered in gory and affecting detail.

Read it and you’ll come away with a powerful insight into intergenerational trauma, in the violence handed down that can feel like prophecy in the way it shapes our lives for years and years to come. Yang’s prose is so accomplished it awed and humbled me whilst simultaneously challenging my Eurocentric education in the best, most enriching way.

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Written down like this, in a succession of confident-sounding declaratives, I must seem very well put together: a miracle of productivity despite my health. So let me put it into perspective for you, sans thrills.

• It took me three books to get my agent, just shy of 300,000 words written, two thirds of them languishing on my limping laptop.

• While on submission to publishing houses, I received rejections from ‘The Big 5’ that stalled my self-belief and affected the pace and confidence with which I began book 2.

• Writing this next book took me a whole year. 365 days, on and off, of pure grind. You know that feeling of your fingers gliding over the keyboard? Yeah, I don’t know her.

• Book two was written in dribs and drabs, sometimes fervently, mostly with my jaw clenched and wrestling a feeling of silent terror that it was a waste of time.

• Now that I have a publishing deal, I haven’t suddenly found much protected time to write - Wednesdays are meant to be my ‘writing day’ but they’re also my post-treatment recovery days, and recently, take my senior dog to therapy days because he keeps getting sick and it’s all very stressful.

• When I sent the first draft to beta readers I didn’t feel confident that they would like it, let alone love it. This one is a different beast - sure it comes from a personal place still, but it’s way more ambitious and I still don’t know if I’m up for the job. I say this even having got to ‘The End’ and sent it to my agent.

Right now, I’m in limbo waiting to hear back from my wonderful and very busy agent. When the editor’s letter lands I know I will freak out at first - tiredness with bloom from my centre; I’ll become quite resistant, then eventually go for a walk, have stern words with myself and begin the arduous process of fixing the manuscript anyway.

All of this to say, there’s nothing sexy about writing book two, or writing at all really. It’s all hard work, but sometimes it’s joyful and when you press on, despite the world and its tragedies, despite your own smaller ones, you engage in a radical act of hope. I still believe this and will defend human made art against the apocalyptic arrival of AI written or edited books until my dying breath. So, look for me and you’ll find me butting my head against my laptop over choosing the easy way out because writing is medicine, it just doesn’t taste nice.

In other news: I am on the hunt for a good signing pen. Please drop any suggestions below, like this one recommended by the lovely people in my 2026 debut group.

Pre-order your copy of ‘A Healthy Appetite’ on the gorgeous new Dead Ink website here.

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What I’m Watching

‘Pluribus’ available to stream now on Apple TV

Look, it’s another apocalypse wrapped up in a shiny, less zombie-guts splatted bow!

Vince Gilligan, of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul fame, has only gone and done it again. Except this time, instead of wickedly ‘attractive’ anti-heroes his next offering hands the mic to a cantankerous misanthrope - a queer bestseller whose world’s about to become stranger than the fiction she writes.

Rhea Seehorn give a flawless performance as Carol, one of a handful of immune people not struck down with a mysterious wave of smiley-faced happiness. While the world has quit its bickering, disarmed its warheads and stalled harming the planet and its creatures, Carol is reeling in the wake of a terrible loss and terrified of what the world has become.

For some, it looks like utopia, for others an alien attack on autonomy. What’s so brilliant about the series is the way it makes you question which is better: a world full of conflict but individuality, or one where we all function as ants in a colony, without violence or division.

Honestly, when I tuned in, I too was reeling in the wake of a reality-shifting loss. Like Carol, I felt suddenly isolated, alone in my grief - the kind of resistant to other people’s happiness than only comes with the implosion of your own reality. Maybe it’s because of this that I loved it so much. I enjoyed how well we get to know the small cast, how beautifully uncanny this realisation of the end of the world is. Above all, it hit that sweet spot of sci-fi treading a fine line, not overwhelming the very human story at the heart of the series.

And in case you’re interested in what I think - it’s humanity over robots ever time. Not that there are any robots here…

5 ☆☆☆☆☆

Current Reads 📚

Decomposition Book - With thanks to my publisher Dead Ink for the gifted proof.

Corpse love: about as unrequited as it gets.

I had a hell of a lot of fun reading Sara Mcclarinet’s debut, so much so, I ripped through it over one weekend. Early readers have been saying the same about A Healthy Appetite, and I used to think this might suggest they weren’t savouring the story, rather racing to the finish line to add another mark on their ‘2026 reads’ list. But it turns out, some books demand to be devoured in a single (for few) sittings, like a TV series that knows just how to leave you wanting more at the end each episode.

Mcclarinet’s novel is epistolary in style with an evenly weighted dual POV that races between a lost hiker and a lonely woman navigating a mental health crisis. It’s a propulsive, wickedly funny firecracker of a novel about obsession, love and what it’s like to wrangle a mind that makes it difficult to live in a human body.

I loved both Savannah and Ava in equal measure and found myself highlighting so many razor -sharp observations I could barely turn the page without grabbing my pen.

Grab your copy here.

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The process of acquiring the blubs you read on the front (or back) of books from authors with a history of publication success, begins with the formulation of a two page press release, incorporating some of the answers from a Q & A I filled in for the PR Agency hired by my publisher. This will be sent to a list of potential endorsers and later, booksellers to give them a bigger picture of the novel and its author: me!

If they like the sound of it, they’ll make a concerted effort to read the novel in the time limit set by the publisher. Usually, this is around three months, although like most things, this will vary from publisher to publisher.

There are over fifty people on my list of potential endorsers, the majority of which my editor, agent and FMcM hand selected. Around a fifth of them are those I sought out myself. Months ago, I knew I’d be asked if there were any authors that might like to blurb my book. Thankfully, I had existing relationships I could call upon, genuine friendships over years of supporting their work. It was time to get vulnerable.

I haven’t made a mystery of my ambitions. Over social media I’ve sought advice, attended zoom sessions on craft, pre-ordered my favourite novelist’s work and shouted about it from the rooftops. None of this done with the prophetic knowledge I might call on them myself one day, but it certainly helped to have made a conscious effort to curate a community online.

The truth is, most of the authors I contributed to the list asked me for an advanced reader copy (an ARC or proof) rather than me approaching them myself. Although none of this early enthusiasm guarantees they will offer a glowing endorsement, it sure feels good knowing I have a chance.

I wondered whether waiting to hear who believes in my debut enough to put their name to it feels worse than being on submission to editors. Once again, the terrible unknown demands I sit on my hands and wait it out while people I admire and respect read the novel I laboured on for years. It feels strange, mildly nerve-wracking, but ultimately miraculous. The fact that I get to be here and do this has not worn off quite yet. I hope it never does.

I’m reminded that I named this newsletter ‘None of this is scientific’ as a healthy reminder. The best I can do is take my own advice and curate as much objectivity as I can. If that author I’ve loved for a decade hates it, it’s not personal. I’ll have a cry then go on loving them anyway.

Asking and getting aren’t mutually exclusive. Sometimes what you really want to happen will. Out of fifty authors, the odds dictate that at least five will read it and say something quotable. Five is wonderful. Five is more than enough to fill in the spaces on the front of the cover and then some.

You can pre-order A Healthy Appetite now!

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What I’m Watching

‘Paranormal Activity’ a play, performed at Ambassadors Theatre

Something a little different this time! No screen in sight, just a stage with a whole two story house suffering a paranormal infestation so horrifying you’ll sleep with the lights on for a week.

I’ve been a horror goblin since I was a child. I grew up on a diet of Goosebumps and Buffy The Vampire Slayer, then, when I needed a stronger hit, graduated to a whole host of horror films I shouldn’t have been watching as a tween.

The Paranormal Activity franchise was one of my favourites. Give me a haunted house, a terrorised family, an entity without a face or name having its wicked way, any day of the week. Horror movies with monsters that burst on the scene via questionable special effects and dodgy prosthetics ruin some of the magic for me. Ghost are different. Spirits, poltergeists, haunted objects. Now these are truly terrifying. How can you fight something intangible? How can you exorcise the kind of absence that makes itself known through you?

I’ll admit, I was sceptical about how all of this would translate to the stage. In the end, I didn’t need to be. These people really know what they’re doing! The home reimagined on stage was utterly convincing, down to the plants lining the stairs and the light pollution streaming through the window from cars passing at night.

There was so much brilliant foreshadowing in details I’ve been mulling over since. The scares were scary and surprising, handled with just the right amount of gusto, and no silly monster skulking from the shadows in sight.

If you can handle some slightly laboured American accents for two hours, and get past the mildly uncomfortable seats, you’re in for a real treat. When the lights go out and Nirvana starts to play, sink in, and hold your loved ones tight.

4 ☆☆☆☆

Current Reads 📚

I’ll Be the Monster by fellow 2026 debut Sean Gilbert

A love story about the worst people you know.

‘A homicidal couple embarks on a luxury holiday to save their marriage. After years of secrets and self-restraint, they’ve reached breaking point.

Three days into the trip, they run into Benny, an acquaintance from their Cambridge days. Once a promising student, now a failed rapper, Benny is desperate to reminisce about a time—and a person—they would rather forget.

And Benny has no intention of leaving.’

Hooray! I present to you one of my favourite reads of 2026 thus far! I’ll Be the Monster is an absolute masterclass of characterisation, dialogue and tension, with some truly despicable moments that made my skin crawl in the best ways.

There’s something gleeful about being invited into someone’s secret madness. I’ll Be the Monster doubles that, offering not one, but two unhinged protagonists set on defending their secrets, no matter the cost to those around them.

When Benny (a tragic rapper with no fans) steps on the scene, you’re not sure whether to implore him to run, or to fear him too. The story will have you guessing right up until the last moment, where revelations are delivered with a whack that’ll send you reeling.

Critics are comparing the novel’s feel to The White Lotus and I think that’s pretty spot on. The novel is jam-packed full of debauchery, dark humour and murderous intent. But this is not a book of cheap thrills - there’s no murderous rampage (although there’s certainly murder) and that’s exactly what I love about it. Gilbert conducts a masterclass of threatening restraint, like a noose tightening slowly around your throat.

The ending is playful in its ambiguity, but not in a sense that frustrates its reader. If you love anything by Sophie Mackintosh or Oyinkan Braithwaite, you’ll love this.

It’s safe to say, anything Sean writes next I’ll be reading first.

Order your copy now.

I’d wondered for two years what my novel’s cover might eventually look like. I used to screenshot cover reveals for other authors whose books I felt offered the kind of aesthetic that would suit A Healthy Appetite. I even made a prototype cover for my beta readers which featured a plate with a bunch of pills on, the letter ‘P’ emblazoned on them to represent the name of the drug in the book. It sounds naff but it was quite good, if I say so myself.

At the time, it helped early readers to kid themselves into thinking the book was a ‘proper thing’ before I had an agent. Sometimes, reading an early version of a writer’s work can feel like a chore - the book hasn’t been professionally edited; it isn’t necessarily ready to be read yet. Giving my manuscript in its unfinished, unedited form a cover felt a bit like manifesting something better in the future.

Flash forward to my book deal and I knew it would earn the cover it deserved, the one that would come to define it for readers. My editor was amazing at ensuring I was involved in the process, hiring a designer I’ve admired for a long time (the always impressive Luke Bird) and letting me have my say in a detailed questionnaire. When I sent her the link to the mood board I’d designed with influential covers and elements I liked the idea of including, she didn’t tell me to leave it to the professionals. In fact, I can see in the finished product that it helped shaped the cover’s direction, that my vision became the artist’s vision - a community effort with Luke bringing it to life.

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When I received the email with the initial designs inside, there were two to pick from. I loved them both but felt quite strongly about the option we didn’t go for in the end. In it, a woman with a smear of tomato puree on her face. It was bold and shocking - the paste easily mistaken for raw meat. The problem was, that for some it was too off-putting. After some back and forth, I agreed it wasn’t the right direction. The other option though, still didn’t feel right in terms of the colour scheme chosen. I told my editor this and she agreed to ask Luke to come up with a few more variations. When he did, and I saw the pink, I knew we’d found our cover.

In typical Dead Ink fashion, it’s a cover that compels without doing too much. There’s a hell of a lot of subtlety to the detail. The little pop of red coming from the guinea pig’s mouth; the guinea pig itself as the perfect metaphor for the drug trail and Hannah’s position as a phase one patient.

The typeface too is perfection for the gothic/horror elements of the story. Luke chose it for its striking and contemporary feel, with its subliminal nod to gothic blackletter, which was used so much in vampiric literature and visual culture. You’ll have to read the novel if you want to see why that matters. See? So much detail.

I hope readers love it. It’s for you really, not for me. Although I have to say, it will be a long time before I can stop staring at it…

In other news, you can now pre order ‘A Healthy Appetite’. I hope that you do - it would look so pretty on your shelf <3

A Healthy Appetite - Dead Ink Books ← PRE ORDER BUTTON.

A Healthy Appetite by Katie Huttlestone | Waterstones ← WATERSTONES

A Healthy Appetite: Amazon.co.uk: Huttlestone, Katie: 9781917792264: Books ← AMAZON

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What I’m Watching

*Disclaimer - It has recently come to my attention that the author who wrote the novel the following movie is adapted from, has spoken against the boycotting of Israeli publishers in the wake of the genocide in Gaza. If you would like to know more, please follow the link to an interview with her on this topic:

Ariana Harwicz against the boycott of Israeli publishers and writers: “It is anti-Semitism and now in the name of good” - Aurora Israel News in Spanish

Die My Love (Dr Lynne Ramsay, 2025)

“I’m stuck between wanting to do something and not wanting to do anything at all.”

Die My Love pushes its actors and its audience to it’s limits - it’s a challenge really. How much can you stand? How much can any of us stand? If the thing you love is in pain and suffering, you put it down. But humans don’t receive the mercy kill animals do. So what happens if you’re forced to weather the storm when all you want to do is set the world on fire?

Die My Love, much like Ramsay’s We Need To Talk About Kevin, had movie-goers walking out of theatres after thirty minutes. Yes, it makes you squirm. Yes, Jennifer Lawrence is at times, unforgiveable. But if you give up you let misogyny win.

In this movie, about a crumbling marriage and the agony and over stimulation of new motherhood, everything, from the music, to the incessant barking of a dog, is meant to replicate those feelings of overwhelm.

Grace’s husband (played by the wondrous Pattinson) is hardly there, and when he is, he’s making things worse. It’s not that Jackson doesn’t try to support his wife. There are moments of genuine tenderness and consideration that demonstrate a love that is hard to deny. It’s more than he doesn’t see her or the scale of her grief. A house renovation and a new car simply won’t fix what’s broken.

Of course, a movie about a relationship on the cusp of disaster is nothing new, but Ramsay’s take is so devastatingly astute, so achingly real, I couldn’t take my eyes off the flames as they burned the whole thing down.

Towards the beginning of the movie, Grace refuses to look through a telescope, claiming that she doesn’t like the stars because they make her feel small. But the lives depicted here are anything but small. Jennifer Lawrence is one of the most versatile actresses of her time. Once you get past the staggering amount of seductive crawling, her portraying of intrusive thoughts winning is staggeringly accurate.

Postpartum psychosis is no joke, and its at the heart of the movie, but it rubs up against Jackson’s mother’s grief too - the loss of her husband forcing its own kind of suspension of reality. In a telling parallel between early motherhood and widowhood, Pam (Sissy Spacek) of Carrie fame, is phenomenal as a woman grieving the loss of her husband. If Lawrence plays a caged dog clawing her way to freedom, than Pam is a sad little bird remembering she still has wings.

4.5 ☆☆☆☆

Current Reads 📚

Room 706 by fellow 2026 debut Ellie Levenson

Kate turns on the television in room 706 to find that the very hotel she is conducting her extra-marital affair out of has been occupied by terrorists and is under siege.

What a killer elevator pitch! I can imagine that when Ellie sent of her query letters to agents, and then the book to publishers, that it gripped them by the throats, as the story does when you read it.

It’s packaged like a thriller, but is distinctly literary, both in the quality of the prose and the careful handling of themes, like how our choices transform not only our lives, but those closest to us. The butterfly effect, if you will.

The novel delays revealing the outcome of the present tense narrative to delve into Kate’s past - how she fell in love with the very husband she’s cheating on; then later, how she came to have an affair.

At it’s heart, this is a novel about the unrelenting demands of motherhood - of the assaults on time and self. When you get past the adultery, Kate’s story is very human. I love characters who are flawed but the writers work hard to help you understand the genesis of the bad decisions they make. Room 706 does this and more with an ending that will divide readers. But really, don’t all the best endings do this?

Buy the book here.

All in all, the manuscript is as clean as it’s gonna get! Of course, someone, somewhere will find something I’ve missed (a rouge comma; an incorrectly punctuated subordinate clause) and proclaim the whole thing trash of the lowest order. Dear future readers, don’t do this. Novels, most of them anyway, have been through so many rounds of edits the author is sick to the back teeth of it by the end.

On what will probably be my personal final read of the novel, I found myself pleasantly surprised. Yes, all the drama has long gone for me - I’ve read it 5000 times. Of course there were moments I cringed and shuddered. But ultimately, the thing holds up! A debut will only ever be as good as the writer was when they wrote it. Hopefully my next one will be even better. That’s normal. What matters is I’ve done my absolute best with what I have now. I’ve got the fatigue to show for it.

As soon as I hit send, the life shot out of me - whatever had possessed me over the past two years floated off into the ether and I felt husk-like and ready for a nap on the sofa (guys, I never nap). So here we are, at the close of another year, but this time I have something tangible to show for it. A whole edited and polished novel that has a release date, a cover, and soon enough, a pre-order link. I have so many people to thank for this, but I’ll save that for the acknowledgements.

Until then, indulge me the following graphics. As a self-proclaimed Luddite they took me bloody ages. I think they’re quite sweet. But beyond that, the wins are all mine. I worked exceptionally hard for them. Happy Christmas you filthy animals. Catch you in 2026!

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What I’m Watching

Locked (Dr David Yaroevsky, 2025)

‘I read somewhere, thou shalt not steal. I think it was in the Bible "Thou shalt not steal". That's not complicated, is it? But, if you do have a problem with that, you can always take it up with God, or Karl Marx, or the Kardashians, or anyone.’

Locked (2025), makes jacked up custom-built SUVs seem suddenly less appealing to anyone tempted to take one for a joyride. I’ll admit it, cars don’t do it for me. The frankly anti-social vroom vrooming of engines; the way men caress cars on Sunday mornings, come rain or shine; the fetishisation of cars dangerous when they first came out, now lorded as a mark of very high taste. Give me my teeny tiny Volkswagen Up and I’ll leave the gadgets and superiority complexes to the filthy rich.

Eddie Barrish (played by Bill Skarsgård) doesn’t have a run-of-the-mill Volkswagen, nor does he have the dollars needed to pay back his mean mechanic and liberate his frankly abysmal truck to work his delivery job. Here’s your stereotypical inattentive father, wooed by weed and scratch cards for quick wins, rather than investing in what really counts: his sweetly forgiving daughter.

In one such episode of irresponsibility, Eddie misses school pickup to prowl the streets for distracted diners, swiping wallets and in one aspirational leap, a pair of designer sunglasses from the inside of unlocked hulk of a car. Except, this ride is owned by William (Hopkins), who nearing the end of his life, is frankly disillusioned with how many times his car has been broken into without consequence.

The police aren’t policing. So much so, Willy’s rigged up a more sophisticated Home Alone style set of devices to torture the next thief who tries his luck. When the law fail to do their duty, its vigilante justice that takes centre stage. Think: electrified seats, a torturous toying with the car’s heating and cooling mechanisms and blacked out soundproof windows that assure no one can see or hear you struggling.

I was surprised and slightly miffed to read afterwards that the movie is a remake of a 2019 film titled 4×4, an Argentinian standalone that doesn’t really need an American counterpart. If I’d known this one already existed, I would have watched that; it’s not like this one’s rated any higher. I suppose Eddie’s toned and tatted body is some consolation, but still, what is the Western world’s obsession with remaking films that stand on their own two feet?

I guess the climax is pretty neat, offering a gory battle of moral compasses and a rich vs poor standoff that has something to say, even if it’s not very nuanced. Come for Anthony Hopkins reprising his role as a psycho killer and stay for the high speed chase scene that will have you driving like a nice civilised person the next time you get behind the wheel. Fair warning, if it’s originally you’re after, kill the gas and hit reverse.

2.5 ☆☆

Current Reads 📚

Darkrooms by - due for publication January 2026.

Darkrooms is set in a small Irish town where the infamous Hanging Woods are haunted by the ghost of a deadbeat Garda’s nine-year-old sister. With no body and no closure for Deedee, the woods keeps hold of its secrets still, but what will it take for it to give them up after all these years?

If Deedee isn’t down the local pub, she’s working a twenty-year-old case she won’t let go cold, especially not now prime suspect Caitlin has returned to the scene of the crime.

Forced back to the ghost town she tried to outrun, Caitlin arrives in the wake of her mother’s death and the strange circumstances surrounding her final night.

Both of the novel’s female protagonists have secrets, and each believe the other to be their enemy. But what if the real evil lurks elsewhere?

Darkrooms is chilling and tragic in equal measure. As the mystery unravels, you’re treated to a dual-perspective that forbids the reader a clean cut hero or villain. Hannigan handles these two very different women with enviable skill. Each perspective has its own voice, it’s own motivation, and the conflict is always at the heart of the narrative.

Whilst I had my suspicions regarding a certain part of the story which transpired to be true, there were plenty more surprises along the way. The intricacy of the plot’s answer is a sure sign of a new talent in the crime writing scene and I’m so excited to see what Hannigan does next.

Pre order Link

Anyway, as I near the end of book two’s first draft, I’m reminded yet again of what doesn’t work for me. I say me because there are plenty of writers who’ve found success doing the very things I’m about to condemn.

For example, a brilliant fellow 2026 debut told me she writes her first draft by hand, then types it up then deletes it and starts again. It’s not the first time I’ve heard of writers following in Gillian McAllister’s footsteps. If it works for a bestseller, who am I to say it’s madness? I still think it’s madness for the record, but only according to my brain’s blueprint, which I seemingly cannot veer away from.

Anyway, here they are, the ‘bad’ bits of writing advice I’ve thrown out over the years. Maybe you have too, or perhaps some of these are your ride and die. Let me know!

1. Delete your prologue.

2. Plan (or else).

3. Write every day.

4. Don’t show your work to anyone until it’s perfect.

5. Write the scenes you’re most excited about first.

6. Don’t you dare edit as you go!

7. The first draft should be draft 0 and thus shitty.

8. ‘Kill your darlings.’

9. Let your work sit for a year before returning to edit it.

10. Don’t tell anyone you’re writing a book.

1* Both of my novels feature a prologue and editors unanimously loved the one that begins A Healthy Appetite so… maybe don’t?.

2* This really has people conflicted. Some people grip hold of their spreadsheets like without them the house of cards will topple, others straddle the line and adopt a quasi-outline which they feel free to depart from. Me? I know the beginning and the end and then it’s all car headlights at nighttime in-between.

3* Don’t shove this one down people’s throats. It’s ableist and breeds the kind of pressure that kills motivation - write when you can, when your mind and body are capable, and that’s good enough.

4* So… never?!

5* Tempting, but what happens when you run out of them and the rest’s just pulling teeth?

6* A novel takes as long as it takes. If you want to review the chapter before the one you’re about to write to find courage and/or save yourself some agony later, why not? The novel will get written either way.

7* This works for people who want to discover the story quickly and then start for ‘real’ afterwards, but the suggestion that a first draft is the ugly stepsister negates the hard work that goes into it. Sometimes, whole scenes or chapters survive from the first draft (some of mine did in A Healthy Appetite and survived all of the rounds of editing too!).

8* This one came up in my debut chat as a real bugbear. In translation: ‘be prepare to edit to serve the story,’ but when prose is wrenched from the gut or torn from the heart, can’t some of our favourite parts be good and true and thus worth saving?

9* This one appears in various iterations. Some times it’s a month, several months or even a year. Whilst I think a bit of space between you and your manuscript is healthy, don’t put a specific timeline on it. Go back when it calls to you again.

10* Writing a novel is not some dirty little secret. If you have pals who ‘get it’ and want to share grievances, or if you have a trusted critique partner, they can really make all the difference to your motivation and mental health.

I think what all of this proves is that there isn’t a single manual for being a writer. It takes an awful long time to find your rhythm and routine. I’m not sure I’ll ever find the magic formula and if anyone tells you they have it, walk the other way.

In other news…

I have a short story published in the brilliant literary mag . The tenth issue is really something special, so do yourself a favour and go check it out. My story features a doppelganger on a dodgy cash-grab acting job he soon regrets…

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What I’m Watching

Sorry, Baby (Dr Eva Victor, 2025)

‘Do you miss me, even though you’re married?’

A24 presents the best kind of love story: the one between childhood friends.

The day before I watched Sorry, Baby I met up with a close friend from university. She’d driven four hours to see me (two hours each way), which was itself, a wonderful act of love. It had been more than a year, maybe two, since we last saw each other. I hate that life does this: tugs you by the hand through days and weeks and before you know it, you’ve neglected to make plans. Sorry, Baby opens with a reunion between two long-time best friends who are doing just this: making a conscious decision to seek each other out.

Time really does fly, and Victor’s self-staring directorial debut reminds us of this often. Blink and you’re married. Blink and you’re having a baby. Blink and you’re still in your hometown, never having really moved on.

When the duo head to dinner with their wider college friendship circle, it appears it’s been four years since they’ve all seen each other too. No one can quite believe it, and it seems the host has compensated for this lapse: the dinner table boasts a ridiculous floral centrepiece, tapered candles in shiny silver holders and the kind of wine that’s obviously very expensive. The conversation is stilted, its themes nostalgic. Old ground, well-trodden. Then a careless comment sends Agnes reeling, and it’s only Lydie that notices she’s been triggered. The one true confidant.

When the weekend’s over and Lydie leaves, I felt my heart ache with the same desperate longing Agnes articulates. Why can’t our friendships always stay close by and always tangible? God, it’s one of life’s greatest tragedies, isn’t it? The way adulthood leaves so little room for quality time with those who don’t cheat or lie or grow to gradually despise us. Lovers come and go, trysts fade into oblivion, but the real connections are those we share with friends.

Agnes and Eldie’s lives have taken them to different states but it’s their reunion which anchors the narrative in the present. Just when we’re warm and fuzzy, the feature’s non-linear style yanks us backwards into Agne’s traumatic past. During her and Eldie’s time as post-graduates she was sexually assaulted by her fawning professor. The movie makes no grand revelation of this – it happened and it lingers in the boots she can’t throw out but won’t wear ever again, or in the sickness attached to the word ‘extraordinary’, which she can’t hear without going back there.

There’s a lot to get lost in over the five years the story spans, but it’s the beauty of Agnes and Eldie’s friendship that reminds us which relationships are the ones that save us, time and time again.

Current Reads 📚

Three killer reads from October/November

Just a tad behind this year, owing to debut edits (eeek) and drafting book two.

These three all deserve a special shout out though because they were exactly what I needed at exactly the right time ♡

Dead Animals by Phoebe Stuckes was unputdownable; another deliciously dark female rage narrative, filled with fantasies of bloodlust and vengeance but also, an incredibly compelling relationship between two women which was both toxic and healing in equal measures. I read along with the audiobook which was also fantastic!

Absorbed by Kylie Whitehead is such a poignant tale of the disillusionment of a relationship, which, although rooted in reality, has a wonderfully executed dose of the supernatural. When Allison absorbs long-term boyfriend Owen, (Yes, you read that correctly!!) She facilitates the ultimate act of dependence. But as Owen begins to fade, she begins to question if he was really ever all she needed to complete herself...

Unquiet Guests a sexy little anthology brought to you by via Dan Coxon was precisely want I wanted of late. Short, devilish tales all grounded in different versions of people’s homes. I loved all of them. No duds. No notes.

Seeing it all laid out: handwritten plans; scribbled revisions; developmental edits in red pen, all of it (legible or not), reminds you that no matter how prolific or famous, no writer worth their salt is beyond hard work, gruelling revisions included.

Over half term I was a woman on a mission: yank myself out of my creative slump and, through any means necessary, feel inspired to write. So much of writing a novel is pure resilience. No one is really getting up every morning before work with a skip in their step as they approach the dreaded blank page. Or, slumped over their laptop at the end of a long day, gagging to put the words down when they’ve spent most of them already. Sure, there are blissful episodes of divinely inspired productivity. Nothing beats tap tapping away without long pauses of agonising indecision. Like writing this now – a low stakes newsletter - It flows because I’m not putting any undue pressure on myself to say something poetic or profound (ideally both).

John le Carré: Tradecraft, a temporary exhibition held at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford is worth visiting even if you’re not a huge fan. My partner can pretty much recite Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which, despite being a cool party trick, goes to show how deeply le Carré’s body of work means to him. I feel this way about other authors, so was happy to go along to check the exhibition out, despite only watching the 2011 movie staring Gary Oldman.

As a writer, I loved seeing the process set out in handwritten notes, character sketches, correspondence and research. It’s not like I’m under any illusion that someday there will be a retrospective in my honour, it was just inspiring to see that there are exhibitions in the first place, honouring art and the power of the written word.

Beyond this, we visited the Wellcome Collection’s latest free offering: Thirst: In Search of Freshwater where I sank into a beanbag for half an hour and listened to the sound of moving water recorded in the glacial fields of Ladakh, the Himalayas, the Canadian Rockies, meltwater streams in Norway, and the Arctic Svalbard. I almost dosed off, lulled by the crackling sounds of ice melting, which of course wasn’t the point – these are glaciers and ice sheets receding as a poignant reminder of environmental loss due to global warming. I got this too – it wasn’t all sleep sounds and lulling around on bean bags.

Also at the exhibit, was one of the most moving photographs I’ve ever seen displayed in real life. Adam Rouhana’s photograph of Palestinian people enjoying the water at Ein Aouja, the largest spring in the eastern West Bank. The image was taken in 2002, and it’s likely the same sanctuary exists due to the ongoing devastation. More than anything, the photo captures Palestinian life thriving under impossible conditions, and the simple joy of water. I won’t include the photograph here, you should go and see it for yourself. Humanity’s connection to water is obviously vital but seeing how far it manifests in our lives – past and present – was really very moving.

Finally, I attended the launch of Dead Ink’s Uninvited Guests, a horror anthology released just in time for Halloween. I loved hearing from three of its contributors (and Dan Coxon it’s editor), including one of my favourite writers Claire Fuller. It was a true joy meeting her in person. Not all of our heroes are worth meeting of course, but Claire reminded me that sometimes we should be brave and do it anyway. With many successful novels under her belt, I was reminded careers are made one story at a time.

So if you’re feeling like the proverbial well is dry, be creative just in other ways. Attend a book event; float around a gallery; take a chance on something you wouldn’t usually do and just see if you’re not ready to head back to the laptop and make magic happen.

By the end of the week, I’d written 3,500 words, a far superior output compared to the weeks before. Now I’m back at work, I’m managing less and less again, but at least I know what to do if the words dry up completly.

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What I’m Watching

She Dies Tomorrow (Dir: Amy Seimetz, 2020)

‘There’s no tomorrow. I’m not fucking crazy.’

Watching a movie on Mubi is akin to an act of detoxification, but it takes a tremendous amount of willpower to resist the other stuff. Netflix is awash with overly explained, artless drivel that caters to the increasingly less functional frontoparietal attention network. Yes, I could spend all Sunday watching the Is It Cake Halloween special, but what would I learn? Certainly not how to spot the cake under mountains of sculpted fondant icing – that cursed doll was cake, but the dodgy-looking jack-o’-lantern wasn’t, go figure!

She Dies Tomorrow opens with what it promises: a character casually browsing urns and picking out the dress she’d, one assumes, like to be caught dead in. Director and writer Amy Seimetz gives the middle finger to exposition, with the movie’s opening refreshingly free from biography, grounded setting, or context clues as to why the young woman is dying and how it is she’s so certain. Assuming these are Amy’s last hours on earth, it’s jarring to find her wine drunk and wielding a leaf blower to clear her back lawn. I suppose there are worst things to do at the end (clean the toilet. Crash a car. Kick a dog etc.)

Amy’s told by her frustrated pal Jane that she certainly will die if she keeps relapsing – this is as close as we get to understanding why Amy might be so set on self-destruction, but she quickly insists that her death is ‘just so’. No one can call her tomorrow because ‘there’s no tomorrow.’ The best she can hope for is that after death, she’ll be made into a leatherjacket (she’s already found the leather worker in Denver); you know, something useful.

Part horror movie, part nauseating existential crisis, the movie is uninterested in placating its viewers. A tonne of shots made me feel physically ill: intermittent red and blue flashing lights with flickering previews of gory specimens had me motion sick.

If you’ve ever wanted to be conscious during an episode of somnambulism, then She Dies Tomorrow is your gal. Anyway, this fear of imminent death, it turns out, is contagious. Having scared the shit out of Jane, the bulk of Amy’s narrative contribution is over, and Jane slopes off in her terror to her brother’s party to announce that she too is going to die tomorrow. And the second domino falls, striking the next and the next…

What I like about the movie’s concept is how it reflects the fragility of the human condition; we’re all just pretending we aren’t flesh sacks, fallible in every sense, living on borrowed time. If you’re expecting some grand collective panic, you’ll be disappointed. No one person reacts to their impending doom in the same way.

As in fiction, I love creatives who aren’t afraid of tackling unanswerable questions. Who we are in death? What will we become, after? How will we act at the end? In the end, I came away oddly comforted by the universality of the human experience and that yes, each day has the potential to be our last, so quit stalling on that unfinished business – feel every twenty-four hours as if they’re your last.

3.5 ☆☆☆

Current Reads 📚

The Death Bed by Chris Bridges – due for publication February 2026.

A novel injected with so much menace, you’ll be left reeling from the lies, betrayals and the wicked lengths characters will go to obtain the objects of their desire. Drenched in blood and drugs, The Death Bed, like Chris’ twisty debut Sick to Death, invites readers into the shadow lives of figures skirting the edges of our consciousness: nurses.

Set across two perfectly managed timelines, 90s London and 2010s Derbyshire, Bridges plucks a gaggle of trainee nurses from obscurity and lets them take centre stage for once. There are plenty of ailing patients, some more worthy of our sympathy than others, but the real focus is on meek and lonely nurse Laura who finds a sanctuary in vivacious Sadie, an older trainee who takes more inspiration from the past than the present.

Under Sadie’s glamorously pruned wings, Laura finds a home – literally and metaphorically – but all is not as it seems at Laurel House. When an anonymous adversary threatens to disrupt the friendship Laura has found, she’s forced to reckon with what she would do to protect it.

Later, after a violent tragedy tears Sadie and Laura apart, in the present-day timeline, Laura is called to Sadie’s bedside. She’s dying and won’t suffer anyone else caring for her in her final days. Besides, it suits Laura just fine; in her delirium, Sadie threatens to reveal the terrible secret that still lives on and Laura must do what she can to stop her. And after all these years, Laurel House isn’t quite ready to let either of them go.

If you love an immersive read, one that’s been expertly drawn from the writer’s experience working in the NHS, then you’ll love Chris’ second novel. I came away utterly convinced by the world drawn, and once again thrilled to see the grittier sides of life depicted with such care and attention.

With thanks to Harper Collins for an advanced reader copy.

As always, my reviews are just that: subjective – none of this is scientific.

Whilst quoting Shakespeare is all very English teacher of me, I can’t help but feel like my own ambition (a tad less ‘vaulting’ than Macbeth’s, it must be said) has invited a sense of evil into my life. I’m being hyperbolic of course, but book two really is a bit wicked. It’s two times harder than book one, at least, and not just because I’m in the system now, all too aware of its ugly bits, and quite frankly, it’s hard to get the desired end goal out of my head in order to write a ‘messy’ first draft.

If we’re doing Shakespeare, we may as well throw in a student-favourite, the brilliant metaphor, ‘o full of scorpions is my mind’, because let’s face it, writing a shitty first draft right after finessing a debut that has been polished to within an inch of its life, is a real kind of psychological torment. When I sit down at the end of a long day to squeeze out the dregs my brain has left to offer, I’m always judgemental of what lands on the page, chronically unable to let it lie until it’s at least halfway decent (subjectively speaking).

Lots of you say that writing a first draft should be akin to vomiting. The analogy, aside from being gross, doesn’t work for me. It’s well-trodden ground to claim that we all learn differently; what works for one person is another’s worst nightmare. Where Macbeth chooses violence, Banquo decides to peruse a more moral, although no less deadly course of action. Because is the figurative vomit draft any less painful? I don’t know about you, but when I throw up, I’m hardly having the time of my life. Equally, the approach I take, five-hundred words or less per session, edited as I go, has its own drawbacks. The main one seems to be the job it does on my self-esteem. The internal-ablest has time to rear up like some kind of judgey ghost and tells me – a chronically ill, disabled person in active treatment – it shouldn’t take this long, that I’m all out of steam.

Why bother when all this effortful agony might not equate to another book deal? Objectively, this noise is a load of rubbish. We all know first drafts are edited, whether they’re clean or not. Despite my best efforts to loosely plan this time, things will change. So why can’t I give myself permission to enjoy the ride by exorcising the moralising ghost?

I said to my critique partner that my crisis of confidence stems from the expectation that a second novel surpasses the last. She didn’t try to negate this reality – we do expect artists to get better, not worse, over the course of their careers. Someone else added that it’s an unfair comparison. A Healthy Appetite is my heart book; there will never be anything quite like it, and that’s okay.

Let it be and move on.

Maybe what I need to do is consider my next project in isolation; think of it as a second debut of sorts, with its own personality and opportunity to introduce itself, detached from any kind of legacy. ‘Legacy’ feels icky in this context, self-aggrandising even (there goes that ghost again, rattling its chains!), but you know what I mean. Some authors reach larger audiences with their next book and in a sense, it becomes a bit of a second go at a debut. The old adage is right: comparison is the thief of joy, so I’m going to keep reminding myself that this book exists in isolation – that it’s damaging to compare it to any form of finished article (published books that aren’t mine included).

Also, if it works for you, I can’t recommend a critique partner enough. Just make sure you set your expectations and boundaries. Possibly, you don’t want big picture notes during draft one because pulling out one matchstick will make the whole quasi-house fall down. So ask them to focus on highlighting the bits they enjoyed or, seek feedback in the form of smaller, actionable suggestions you can fix in less than fifteen minutes. This works for me, and seems to spur me on knowing what I’m moving on from isn’t total carnage.

So where am I now? Novel two isn’t under contract but I’m nearing 60k and I’m remembering to celebrate all of the milestones. Last week I bought a deliciously nostalgic sticker book from my childhood and have begun the aspirational hunt to find the stickers to complete it. Regressing into the nicer parts of my childhood reminds me to let loose every once in a while – to let the nagging adult rest.

Ultimately, I didn’t think I could do it again – dare to imagine anything beyond my last project – yet here I am, doing it anyway, even if it’s sometimes troublesome and always twice as hard as it ever was before it became real.

– K x

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What I'm Watching

The Vigil (Dir: Keith Thomas, 2019)

Taking a break, from the Insidious franchise, Blumhouse, via debut writer-director Keith Thomas, has a bash at the horrors that might be found in the Orthodox community of Boro Park, Brooklyn, in what promises to be a horror movie with most of the expected moves, plus some Yiddish and interestingly, head and arm tefillin - a getup I haven’t seen once before in the hundreds of horror movies I’ve watched.

It’s never not dicey, it it? Invoking the very-real traumas of The Holocaust for the maybe-cheap thrill of a good scare. But The Vigil isn’t cheap-looking, nor does it skimp on the kind of actors who feel right for the piece. Dave Davis is so convincing as a lapsed orthodox Jew, (he does terrified twitching like no one ever before), that I didn’t mind much that the end felt a bit convenient (I’m reminded of the recent ending to the Conjuring franchise - if you know, you know) , or that the character he plays sits with his back to the dead body he is meant to be watching over, and later falls asleep. There’s zero chance you’re sleeping in that haunted house, especially not with the corpse’s grieving widow flopping about upstairs. The movie redeems itself though, when Davis does what we scream at the TV to do: RUN AWAY, and the organised evil undoes our momentary relief by having him literally crawl back. We can’t ignore what scares us; there’s no running from it.

The Vigil taught me stuff too - like, for instance, what a ‘dybbuk’ is (see: a Jewish folkloric disembodied soul, searching for a host to scare the living daylights out of and, in parasite-style, feed from). I want horror movies to make me feel thirty-minutes-of-cardio-wrung-out, but I also, more and more, need them to do something fresh. I’m ashamed to admit, that these days it’s harder and harder to scare me. Possibly, we have our very horrifying real world to thank for that - the news is never not a source of anxiety and terror, is it?

At its heart, Thomas’ debut is about the indelible legacy of guilt and trauma, and how complicated faith’s place is in healing from it. I found the historic presence of The Holocaust applied to the modern-day events of the movie, sensitively and tastefully done and would love to see more big-budget production companies cover spaces other than ‘well-trodden ground’ when it comes to the cultures their movies are located in.

4 ☆☆☆☆

Current Reads 📚

Pre-Halloween reads...

This incredibly vile book is perfect for spooky season, but alas, you greedy lot will have to wait until February 2026 for your first taste. 🥀🍄🧨👹💋

With total transparency, I put on my big girl pants and asked for an early reader copy of this because I couldn’t wait. Patience has never, ever been my strong suit. So what follows is born from devouring a gifted copy of the novel, but as always, these are my my honest (yet subjective) thoughts immediately after finishing.

He’s The Devil by Tobi Coventry is an absolute bomb of a modern horror story, which takes the loneliness epidemic and shoves it up against one horny, hungry devil looking to make new friends.

Having a flatmate is so often hell, but what about when the person who moves in isn’t alone? Simon is upset at first, grieving the sudden loss of his former flatmate Josh... then Simon starts to see in Massimo an impish, dangerous force, one he’s not entirely repulsed by. But who is Massimo really? Beyond the striking Italian boy, with a penchant for mushrooms and bell peppers straight from the jar. You’ll have so much fun finding out...

Tobi Coventry is such a fresh talent, with unhinged prose for days and a wicked imagination. If you loved Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s Monstrilio and Lucy Rose’s The Lamb, grab this as soon as it hits shelves, and don’t even question it when this devilish treat asks to be invited in.

Bonus October Recommendations

As always, my reviews are just that: subjective – none of this is scientific.

There were a handful of comments to address too, but these were minor. The relief was immense. I’d anticipated a whole range of problems. An editor seeing through the flimsy science and finding some reason none of it could work – the whole premise undone. Of course, none of this happened. It turns out, if you do the work, it’s likely to pay off down the line. Those hundreds of hours spent writing, carefully researching, drawing from authentic episodes in the drama of my own life – all of it, fine!

Convincing even.

The teacher’s pet in me, once again, rejoiced at hearing my copy editor had said there wasn’t much to do: my manuscript was largely clean. Maybe 2273 revisions sound like the beginning of a horror story: a writer gone mad by the constant, ever-changing, desires of a cursed manuscript. Is it ever enough? Will it ever be done? In reality? They were all commas. OK, most of them. I spent hours accepting commas, punctuating compound nouns and adjectives. Learning the difference between ‘lie’ and ‘lay. SPaG stuff you think you know, but it turns out fall through the net, no matter how many times you re-read the manuscript.

My experience won’t be, and isn’t, everyone’s. In my wonderful debut novelist group (a-rite-of-passage WhatsApp group someone bravely makes, and hope others join), many authors generously shared their copy edit horror stories. Some had grappled with editors making changes to their manuscript that felt incongruous, inferior, counter-intuitive even. Altering the style of their prose, or the flow of their punctuation choices which they didn’t agree with. ‘Stet’ became a kind of war cry – the author’s written defence of their choices made for style over the sometimes-stuffy expectations of the English grammar.

I had to google ‘stet’, which, it turns out, is Latin for ‘let it stand.’ A writer pal said to me that she felt ‘stet’ was overly aggressive, dismissive even, and that a mere ‘I love this – I’d like to keep it,’ would be better. I can see her point, but I guess ‘stet’ is quicker when there’s so much you want to defend. And that’s our right: to defend the prose we’ve spent hours on already, with agents and our editors.

But copy editors aren’t out to get us. They’re doing their job, which isn’t always in-line with our creative ambitions. Knowing when to push back and when to embrace their expertise is the real battle. Those writers in my debut group who managed to ‘save’ the parts they wanted to had courage, and I respect them for not bowing down to the sometimes-intimidating ‘industry expertise’ and knowing it wasn’t what the writing needed.

The comments/changes that didn’t resonate with me were small. I highlighted them, and in my own comment (in track changes) I left an alternative suggestion, or defence, of what was already there for my editor, Harriet. She then read these through and largely agreed with me, which was reassuring. Sometimes your instinct really is right! Go figure.

Now my copy edit is done, there will, once again, be a kind of misty limbic state where I won’t hear anything for a good few months. This doesn’t mean nothing is going on behind the scenes. In fact, the other day I filled in a cover questionnaire (one of the more exciting bits of paperwork a debut meets!). This means some very talented artist is working on my cover, and eventually, I’ll get to see it.

In addition to this, my novel will be typeset ready for printed ARCs (advance reader copies).

In a premature burst of excitement, I purchased a small antique shelf and tidied it up, ready to receive said ARCs, and eventually, the finished copies. Only my books will go on the shelf. I’ve earned this hubristic showpiece, and 2273 revisions are the least of it.

– K x

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What I'm Watching

Cuckoo (Dir: Tilman Singer, 2024)

Cuckoo. The science fiction horror thriller none of us asked for but we got anyway, serving bird women in trench coats, 1950’s style glamour and one hell of a mating call.

I wanted to watch this for a really long time. The bit in the trailer where the wonderful Hunter Schafer is doing an incredible job of cycling at night, down the middle of the road with headphones on, really whet my appetite. It won’t surprise you that I love horror that features dishevelled witch-like women chasing their unsuspecting victims. Bonus points for a terrifying gait. Cuckoo promised this and more: a trippy, out-of-time setting featuring a so-called ‘health resort’ in the stunning German Alps; an energetic cast keen to prove their chops; a sinister secret, barely contained.

Gretchen, our 17-year-old final girl, is super pissed about having to relocate to the Bavarian paradise her mean father and his new wife and daughter are relocating to. Who wouldn’t be annoyed at that view? The alpine beauty of the Bavarian Alps and mountains as the first thing you see each day? Puke. But there is the fact her mother has just died and she’s grieving. Turns out paradise isn’t enough to filter that trauma out.

Pretty early into the movie, Gretchen is handed a job working reception at the Alpschatten Resort. Purpose is powerful and all that! But her first shift on the job gets weird real quick. Guests throw up in the middle of the gift section, without apology. Her boss, the eccentric Herr König, warns Gretchen not to leave at the end of her shift alone: he will personally collect her at 10 p.m. on the dot. Then there’s the staff Gretchen works alongside, who all look like they have wondered confusedly out of an 80’s sitcom.

In an immediate show of teenage defiance, Gretchen doesn’t lock up and she doesn’t wait for her boss, but cycles home, and is, indeed, perused by the aforementioned Witch Woman of The Alps. I’m being facetious, of course. She isn’t quite a witch, but witch-adjacent (I won’t spoil it for you.)

Gretchen gets in a wonderful amount of scrapes and in her vulnerable state, is tasked alongside a mysterious police office on the hunt, with taking on the threatening secret behind all of this weirdness. Her family are of zero use. In fact, one of them may instead be working against her.

If you love ethereal beauty, bloody faces, fairly unique takes on creature features, then Cuckoo is worth a watch. If you want to feel satisfied by the answers the movie offers at the end, then you might be disappointed. When all was said and done, I felt a little bereft. It’s not like I require a neat, unambiguous ending, hell that’s kind of my speciality, but it fell short of offering something that, trench coats aside, wasn't a little generic.

3 ☆☆☆

Current Reads 📚

Pre-Halloween reads...

My wonderful postman delivered Tender last week, prematurely ahead of the official release, so I had to pause everything to read it.

Tender is a literary folk horror novel, featuring an up-and-coming botanist with a killer manicure who digs up more than ancient history from boggy fenland in Somerset.

Nell, our protagonist, must unearth the long-suppressed truth of her childhood, before she loses herself to the sucking filth of the trenches, where more than bodies wait to be uncovered.

I'd never heard of an archaeobotanist before, let alone how one might read the past through plants. Lauren has clearly done a whole lot of very impressive research into lesser known fields, and did so with such conviction, such gusto, I had to check the author page at the back of the book, to see if she had first-hand experience of 'bog bodies'. She doesn't. She's that good.

If you love a good blend of folklore and body horror, you'll love this tale of one woman's disintegration. It's a transformation story like you've never read before, blazing with sunlight and a whole load of gnarly thistles.

Influx Press are totally killing it at the moment, and Tender is a welcome new addition to the brilliant 'monstrous feminine' canon we're seeing thrive.

As always, my reviews are just that: subjective – none of this is scientific.

In 2019 his first novel On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous garnered such a staggering list of literary accolades (National Book Award nominee. Best book of the year by The New Yorker, The Guardian and many more), you’d be mistaken for assuming he was set for life. He sold over a million books for God’s sake. A million!

If I sold a few thousand I’d consider it a success. And yet, in 2025 Important Literary People are rising from the great depths of ‘wisdom and taste’ to retrospectively tear his debut alongside his recent offering The Emperor of Gladness apart, claiming an excess of ‘poetry’ and not enough ‘depth’ as a recurring outcry against his success. Some have taken to dissecting his work, line by line, and ‘correcting it.’ It all sounds like sour grapes to me.

If we criticise a book and its author having never written one ourselves, having not torn the still beating thing from our chest and, with the vulnerability of a mewing newborn, sent it out into the world, you’ve got to approach your response to the thing with the care and consideration it deserves. Are we all going to love every book published? Hell no. There is plenty of genre fiction that isn’t for me. If I read a book and it doesn’t align with what I typically enjoy, will I feel the need to publicly tear it down? Never. It’s not a good look. It’s not kind. It feels entirely like adding to the hellfire of the world, fanning its already staggering flames.

How much objectivity can we have with fiction anyway? If I had a pound for every time a rejection slip told me their lack of enthusiasm for my work was ‘subjective’, I’d have over a hundred pounds maybe, enough to take myself and my partner out for a fancy dinner. That infamous line in rejection emails is meant to be comforting, a: It’s not for me but it could be for someone else – keep trying. So why come down so hard on a book when it’s for someone else and just not you?

All of this got me thinking: how will I feel when I face a bad review for the first time? Some people go to great lengths to bypass seeing them. A writer pal told me their partner has created some technological feat that filters out the worst of the reviews, so she doesn’t have to see them. A tempting proposition indeed. Whilst I haven’t decided if I’ll go to similar lengths, I already know that I’m a people pleaser, a teacher’s pet. I’ve had thirty-five years to learn this about myself.

All throughout the editing process I’ve agonised over pleasing my editor, and before that my agent. I respect these professionals and don’t want to waste their time. When my editor emailed to say she was ‘really happy with the changes!’ (exclamation point and all!!), and then later, thanked me ‘for being so brilliant to work with and for writing such an exciting book!’ I squealed will glee, knowing I had done the thing well and pleased the person I was collaborating with. I am a total slut for positive reinforcement, it seems. All of this suggests I will crumble apart at the faintest whiff of criticism. Maybe. But I’ve just written about a best seller, million-copies sold phenomenon and the haters swarming upon him and his work. It’s all subjective, baby! Maybe I’ll get that tattooed so it’s always within eyeshot. Because let’s face it: haters gonna hate.

I thought it would be deliciously fun to end on a list of the things readers might not like about my book (but that they may also LOVE):

• My protagonist is spiky and sometimes unruly (in other words, she grows into her power);

• Her moral compass is, at times, jeopardised and she acts selfishly (some might say she’s earnt it);

• A Healthy Appetite is written in first person. It’s EMO (and heartfelt; honest about the cost of late-stage illness);

• It isn’t uplifting and obviously escapist (but isn’t all fiction in some way ‘escapist’ anyway? My book let’s you body jump into a life that isn’t yours. It’s speculative, at times horrific, thrilling in ways that your life won’t be. Here’s hoping!);

• There are triggering themes like hospital treatments, terminal illness and death (we can run, but we can’t hide. Eventually we need to learn about navigating this shit as mere morals, so why not start now!!?)

OK…I am sure there are a hundred other reasons it might not be for you, but if you read it and hate it as much as certain critics hated on Ocean Vuong, maybe consider quietly DNFing it. You can keep your scathing Instagram post, thank you very much!

In all seriousness, what I’ve taken from all of this is that the world could use a lot more kindness. So maybe I won’t actively seek out reviews. The good ones that find me will be enough. You can tag me in those.

– K x

Screen Saver 🎬

What I'm Watching

Weapons (Dir: Zach Creggar, 2025)

Weapons (2025), directed by Zach Cregger is so fabulously creepy, so drenched in tension, I forgot I was at the cinema, and that the gaggle to my right were talking the whole way through.

I watched his previous offering Barbarian, the Airbnb horror, gleefully three years ago and was thrilled to hear he’d done it again. Weapons is a multiple POV narrative that slips seamlessly between each character’s contribution and leaves no crumbs. I felt like God, with an omniscient eye, watching, mouth-agape, the horrors below.

Cregger wrote the movie in the wake of a close friend’s death and experienced a kind of catharsis through it. If you’re interesting in attaching context to art, then you might be interested to know there’s some biographical elements too – an ode to a troubled childhood. Beyond this though, the movie’s premise pays off. A whole class of kids bar one flee into the night. Every one of them, in the same peculiar fashion, run away from home. What follows, are the townsfolk’s attempts at unravelling the mystery.

There are no spoilers here, so I can’t write anything about the character who pops up later and is a total scene-stealer. There are talks of a prequel about said character, and honestly, I would eat that up.

Was it worth the bidding war? I’d say so. I want more. My partner wants more. Those that say otherwise don’t like bloody good fun.

5 ☆☆☆☆☆

Poolside Reads 📚

The BEST books to read on holiday from the archive...

A rundown of the books I read over the summer holidays:

Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga is up for the Booker this year, but on radar before because of its killer cover by Luke Bird! My 5 🌟 read of the summer! A beautiful, melancholic meditation on the boundary between home/land and self. I loved this divine exploration of the role of interpreting set against the cost of compassion on marriage and security. It's literary, sure, but skillfully propulsive. Start here if you're curious about the Booker Longlist!

Tales From The Café, the second instalment in the series, does much of the same as the first did: catapult people back in time for one last encounter with a lost love one. It didn't offer anything new in this sense, but it was touching and, as before, a beautiful exploration of the impact love has over time.

The Rachel Incident is my first O'Donoghue, but it won't be the last. An original exploration of obsession, first love and friendship that had me gleeful at the switch-up on the tired 'in love with a professor' tale.

Boy Parts has been reviewed a lot, so I'll keep it brief: killer plot, lots of nastiness i loved, and a refreshing take on gender/power imbalances. A super accomplished debut!

All Fours was a brilliant razor-sharp meditation on entering the so-called second half of a woman's life, full of desire and sex and introspection. I loved parts 1 and 2. Three less so, but overall, a vital addition to my bookshelf.

Thirsty Animals by Rachelle Atalla has been on my radar for yonks! I adored the choice of setting: Scotland in the throes of a terrible drought and the implications for humanity, nature and land. At times heart-breaking, the private is political rings true here. A really worthwhile climate novel that sits well alongside the recently read 'Send Flowers'.

As always, my reviews are just that: subjective – none of this is scientific.

I’ll start with a confession: there are two other novels in my closet. The first, an end of the world love triangle that is all vibes and very little plot (the vibes are pretty unhinged though, which seems to be a common thread in my writing).

This, in the full delusion of innocence, I sent to over fifty something agents.

In my submission letter I made grand declarations like: ‘Think the dystopian, bubble within a world, of Sophie Mackintosh’s The Water Cure and team it with the inverted fairy-tale style of Clare Fuller’s Our Endless Numbered Days’. Which sounds pretty sick, right? Except again, all vibes and not much plot, which it turns out is a necessary ingredient in a pitch that really hooks agents. I had one full manuscript request, a miracle really, which I became fixated on. The agent regretfully passed, but she said nice things about my writing, so I decided to bench the novel and start something new – a work with a more fully rounded cast, familiar setting and no misery apocalypse, which during covid no one wanted.

My second novel was polished to a sparkling shine; I worked with a writing coach and felt empowered, informed and enjoyed a brilliant taste of editing as a collaborative act which would later help with the work I did with my agent and recently, my wonderful editor Harriet at Dead Ink.

By novel #2, I had visibly grown as a writer – the proof was in the feedback I got from agents this time. MORE (a grand total of three!) full manuscript requests and a ‘big-time’ agent’s attention who asked for a Revise-and-Resubmit1. Her ideas enriched the story, and I learnt from much from the ordeal but in the end, she was on the fence with whether she could sell it. After consulting with her business partner, it was an apologetic ‘no’.

I was devastated. My partner had to sit through hours of me declaring, ‘I can’t do it again. I can’t write another whole novel with no promise it will go anywhere.’ I was lost in my dreams of publication, totally bereft without external validation.

I often wonder, what would I say to my defeated self back then? Would I cheat heartbreak and say ‘don’t worry love, you’re going to get a deal within a year and one more manuscript and THAT novel, that’s your heart book. That’s the one you were meant to debut with.’

No.

I wouldn’t say any of that because I am proud that I knew none of that and did it anyway. Wrenched A Healthy Appetite from my gut with no reassurances, no knowledge at all that this deeply personal story would resonate with anyone but me.

Because you’re reading this you already know I got my happy ending. I didn’t quit, despite my threats to do so. But I didn’t have it easy the third time around either.

What follows are the things I did to MAXIMISE my success, not assure it:

1. I stopped worrying about what might be commercially appealing (like novel #2) and sat with myself and listened to my tortured poet heart. What story did I have to tell that no one else could? The answer was pretty immediate: a story about the monstrous side-effects of long-term illness, of the cost of survival. The story unfurled from me with an ease that I didn’t experience with novels #1 and #2. That’s when I knew I had something;

2. I furiously entered competitions and was long-listed for two: The Lucy Cavendish Prize for Fiction and The Blue Pencil Agency Pitch Prize. Both long-listings got people’s attention, sure, but they also gave me something I was genuinely proud of to write about in my query letter – they made agents sit up and see I was serious about my craft;

3. I attended agent 1-2-1s2. These come at a cost (fair warning), and are available through both Jericho Writers and I Am in Print. For me, they are worth the price tag if you can afford it. Industry insiders make the whole venture less opaque. Their feedback WILL make your submission package more appealing and you MAY receive a full request then and there, although there are no guarantees!

4. I learnt to be vulnerable and very gratefully received financial support from my partner to join the Faber Academy’s Write Your Novel course. This gave me community, accountability, industry expertise and the glowing, much-respected anthology with an extract of my work inside sent around to agents. Fourteen full requests and two offers of representation came from this experience. ‘Life-changing’, usually a mawkish adjective, fits here. If you can and want to: do!

I first met Imogen at an agent 1-2-1. Before I’d even finished my novel she wanted to read it. We parted that day with a promise to get back in touch, which we did, when I finished the novel and could prove the concept she loved would materialise.

Imogen was the first agent to believe in A Healthy Appetite and she didn’t stop, so she became my agent.

So how did I get my agent? In a nutshell, I’m afraid there isn’t one straight line from wanting to getting, but a series of side quests and setbacks that all lead me here, exactly where I’m meant to be. Hindsight is a superpower we don’t have when we send out novels like little, heart-filled messages in bottles, hoping they’ll land on someone’s shore.

So keep up the good work. Feel all the feels, find your community and where you can, invest in your dreams.

– K x

Screen Saver 🎬

What I'm Watching

The Other Lamb (Dir: Małgorzata Szumowska, 2019)

God, I'm a slut for cult stuff. It can't have started with Sophie Mackintosh's The Water Cure, but it sure helped bring me back to the delights of the deranged, insular lives of theocracies 'built on a hill', or in Mackintosh's case, a nondescript island.

In Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, which is essentially about a nation-wide cult swallowing America whole, the protagonist Offred remarks that the puritans are the Handmaid's 'ancestors', or at least that's what those in power want them to believe.

'...paintings, of women in long somber dresses, their hair covered by white caps, and of upright men, darkly clothed and unsmiling. Our ancestors.'

The Other Lamb opens with a nod to this: the starched 'sombre dresses' of the female puritans, as two of them play hooky in front of a startlingly beautiful waterfall. I'm certain there's symbolism here, but I won't ruin the fun by unpicking every close -up shot of water cascading hysterically over a brooding cliff face. Hang on, the camera is zooming it and it kind of looks like...never mind.

Ah the proverbial lamb next, a whole herd of them. Then: women knitting, singing, sawing, hammering and following up the rear, a mural of their Jesus lookalike cult leader. Immediately this movie is a visual masterpiece. At once lush and unsettlingly empty of warmth, of homely touches.

It's no real spoiler to say that 'Shepherd' (heavy on the biblical analogy) is a raging pervert who likes his wives young and plentiful. In an early scene he literally Eeny, meeny, miny, moes who he's going to sleep with that night. Not everyone is included though - there are some, apparently, who are not ready.

The movie centres Selah, a 'pious and perfect' girl born into the cult and traces her transformation into a questioning protagonist, someone who strives beyond wifehood and the odd strings that visually act as a kind of web that keep the women pinned in the compound. The catalyst? When the blood comes, which triggers Selah's growing into consciousness and all the horror that surrounds it.

My work in progress is about a women- only cult of sorts, and so I loved soaking up all the vibes, which were on point. The women's devotion despite their abuse is, at times, hard to stomach, but it isintrinsic in laying the ground work for the catharsis offered later on.

My main gripe? The extended metaphor of 'the flock' and 'The Shepherd' became a bit grating. The cult leader dude too didn't offer anything new IMO. A bearded white guy on a powertrip.

That being said, I stayed tuned to see it all burn down...and damn, I was not disappointed.

3 ☆☆☆

Poolside Reads 📚

The BEST books to read on holiday from the archive...

Bad Fruit by Ella King (HarperCollins, 2022)

Bad Fruit by Ella King is devastating and beautiful in equal measure. The clash of flora and sunlight against familial trauma and violence was a gut, heart, head punch of a read.

Lily serves Mama glasses of perfectly off juice to appease her, to extinguish the rage that's always simmering below her bright pink surface. But Lily's suppressed trauma is starting to play show reels of scenes she doesn't recognise, and the unfaltering love she has for her Mama is about to be tested like it never has before.

I found this novel deeply moving, deeply loud in the sense that it told me things I, too, had forgotten about my life, or my brain has chosen to forget for me. Reading this felt like an exorcism. There's a section about how brain matter turns white when the person has been through trauma, and I suddenly remembered my MRIs and the white marks on my own brain. I empathised and cried. Felt it all deeply. This novel is one of those I'll keep close and remember for a very long time.

5 🍊🍑🍎🍇🍉

As always, my reviews are just that: subjective – none of this is scientific.

The movie and book review that follow in this newsletter were a breeze to write. Low stakes. This, the highlight of the newsletter however, had me lost for words.

I think it might take me a little while longer to find the right ones, but for now, know that this news is the best of my life. A dream that's been an entire being in the making. Every treatment, every pill, every scan, all of them endured with the dogged hope I'll be here to say: I did it.

My novel, A Healthy Appetite, will be published by the coolest and most supportive team at Dead Ink in August 2026. The world is very hard right now, and we must stay conscious and proactive and alive to it. In tandem with this, we must still feel joy.

I hope that you will follow my path to publication and find some. Joy and hope and eventually, when you read my book, see in me, the roots of all of this.

Read the deal announcement on The Bookseller, Bookbrunch and check out Dead Ink’s website.

– K x

Screen Saver 🎬

What I'm Watching

Presence (Dir: Steven Soderbergh, 2024)

Ever wanted to see the world through a ghost's eyes? Well, now you can with Presence, a movie with an especially athletic spectre as your POV. The step count Casper's raking in on his ghostly Apple Watch must be insane.

The movie opens in the pitch black spooky realness of nighttime. The house is empty, unoccupied and one assumes, the ghost is just gagging for someone to fill it: a whole family to scare the shit out of.

In daylight, the house is a subburbian dream house. Marbled kitchen island and swanky light fixtures. The ghost is there in the daylight too, following the family around during their viewing. It stalks the teen girl up the stairs and I think, great, it's going to possess her or fall in love with her. Is this like that one season of American Horror Story where the handsome lad who hangs out in murder house is a ghost and it's pretty mental but sexy, so you know, he gets away with a lot of stuff. But no, the ghost follows all of them. Even the decorators who make the house a different kind of nice. One of them is like clairvoyant or something because they 'won't go in that room', which seems like something worth interrogating but the patriarch looks pissed then shurgs it off.

By this point, I'm ready for the ghost to start doing something other than eaves drop... but then it dawns on me: you the viewer, are the ghost - whoever they are. Trust the process. Strap in, and when I accept this, the books start floating, and that's when I know I've pickled a banger.

The third act really ramps up, so hold on to your hat folks! I'm talking, eyes glued to the screen, mouth in the shape of an 'o' madness and when the revelation comes, my God, does Lucy Liu steal the show.

For fans of Paranormal Activity, Presence is a refreshing take on the haunted house genre. There is more to the narrative than what goes bump in the night (and day). This is a story of a family's unravelling, of grief and fuck ups and the catastrophic reverberations of loss. The central mystery of who the ghost is, of why they're haunting the house kept me gripped all the way until the end.

4 ☆☆☆☆

Poolside Reads 📚

The BEST books to read on holiday from the archive...

The Animals In That Country by Laura Jean McKay (Scribe UK, 2021)

The Animals In That Country is a vivid, razor-sharp exploration of humanity's relationship with animals.

When a viral outbreak means the afflicted start hearing what animals are REALLY saying, the world is tipped outside down.

Jean, our foul-mouthed guide, loves her job playacting what the animals are saying. But when zooflu strikes, and she can ACTUALLY converse with the animals, she's forced to confront the complexities of the animal world and its fixations, tragedies, yearnings and grievances.

The novel is a speculative roller coaster ride. A road trip, to be precise. Jean sets out with her favourite dingo, Sue, who has an unforgettable voice of her own, to recover her granddaughter and son. What she meets along the way is so much of humanity's worst.

The staccato poetry of the animal's voices can be jarring at first, but the sense that infiltrates the jumbled words, when they do land for the reader, are heartbreaking. The scene with the abandoned pigs freed from their slaughter trucks particularly struck me. Their voices a chorus of lamentation that joins the diary cows and their cries for their babies.

If you're after something original, memorable, and as a challenge to how you view the world and our animals, grab this, and you'll never look at animals the same way.

5 ☆☆☆☆☆

As always, my reviews are just that: subjective – none of this is scientific.

As a disabled author I can't promise I'll be super regular, but I can offer an authentic and raw insight into what it's like to write whilst navigating health stuff. There will be bookish bits, craft tid bits and more.

Please stay tuned, I promise some exciting and certainly less *vague* news is heading your way soon.