Headphones and Notebooks

As I come to the end of my Masters degree in creative writing, I’ve realised there are plenty of things that I wish I had been told about writing. I’m sure I’m not the only one who wished that they’d been told more about writing before they got into it. So here are my top five things: There’s no correct way to write That’s right. Turns out, there’s no correct way to write. It doesn’t matter if you write for long periods of time, or short bursts, whether you write whenever you feel like it, or at a specific time of day. With coffee, or wine, or juice; with the television on or off; sat at a desk, or hanging upside down from a tree. It’s whatever works best for you. And what that means is that sometimes you just have to accept you’re not going to write today, or sometimes you have to force yourself to write. But, at the end of the day, you’re not doing it right or wrong, you’re doing it how it suits you. It’s fine to change your mind about what you want to write A lot o

When Boom! Studios announced that it was also rebooting Angel the Series alongside its rebooted Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics, I was excited to see where they would go with it. But I have to admit, my first impressions aren’t exactly outstanding. Perhaps the biggest thing with the new Angel comics is that so far there is very little that is recognisable from the WB series. With the Buffy comics, we had a host of recognisable characters and locations from the start, but we don’t have that with Angel’s story. In fact, currently Angel is lurking in Sunnydale rather than LA, which proves interesting for how it will link into the Buffy comics but doesn’t yet introduce people to the characters of Angel . Angel’s backstory has been adapted somewhat, with many fans pointing out that his being turned earlier at around sixteen (as opposed to the onscreen twenty-six) makes a romance with Buffy much more possible. But as others have pointed out, while the comics have ditched what

It’s here. Issue five of the Buffy rebooted comics from Boom! Studios has landed. After that cliff-hanger ending of the first arc, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this one. Perhaps the most obvious thing about issue five is the change in illustrations. With Dan Mora having illustrated the first arc of comics, I was a little surprised to see that this second arc was being illustrated by David Lopez. I’ll admit, while Lopez’s art is intriguing, I found myself longing for the clean lines of Mora’s illustrations. I felt like his art was more polished and worked better for me overall, as well as providing a better likeness of the characters. The illustrations in this issue also felt darker, although that could just be a case of so much of the plot happening at night, and I may not have the same concerns when issue six drops. As for the story itself, I was glad to see Jenny Calendar properly introduced to the comics beyond the hint we got in issue four, and I liked the fact we

When I first heard about the Good Omens (Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett) series, I was definitely intrigued. I’d heard about the book, but never read it, and I was interested to hear what it was about. I did some digging, and found that, while I had never given the book much thought before, it sounded like something I would enjoy. Hearing about the casting for the new TV series only added to my intrigue, and I found myself interested to know more. Fast forward nearly two years to June 2019, and I found myself not quite as excited for the show as I had been in autumn of 2017. The reason was simple- I’d bought the book, and had been trying to read it before the series started. For whatever reason- life, my decline in reading, personal taste- I had been reading the book for over eighteen months and was still just over halfway through. (Or, as my GoodReads reliably informs and mocks me, 65% finished.) I’d found parts of it intriguing and amusing, and I always managed to slip stra