Workshopping your MS

Hope everyone is once again ready for me to talk AT LENGTH about how Guillermo del Toro is my personal hero and my saviour - it's time for me to talk about CLOTHES!

My presentation, Buttoned Up Tight: Gothic Themes in Costume Design, is at 5pm tomorrow!

It’s that wonderful time of year again – Romancing the Gothic, run by the inimitable Doctor Sam Hirst, is raising money for Magic Breakfast, a UK-based charity that provides free breakfasts for hungry school kids across England and Scotland.

I am privileged to be a part of the incredible line-up for tomorrow, where you can choose your ticket price to donate as much as you’re able to the cause – and don’t worry if your Saturday is already booked and you’re not able to join online, as all the non-interactive sessions will be recorded and available to peruse afterwards.

Here’s the line-up:

9am – KJ Charles – Writing Workshop – “Fashioned Creatures, But Half Made Up” : A Workshop on Building Character through Your Text’

10am – Artemis Writers – Writing Workshop – ‘The Secret Language of Flowers’

11am – Nicole Wolverton – ‘Horror, Hospitality, and the Social Risk of Saying No’

12 noon – Evan Hayles Gledhill – ‘Consumption and Identity: The Cultural Significance of the Cannibal Queer Trope’

1pm – Alessandra Pino – Cooking Workshop – ‘A Shock to the System: Frankenstein in the Kitchen: Villain or Vermicelli’?

2pm – Siân Pearce – ‘All of Us Renfield: The Gothic Solicitor’

3pm – Cat Irving – ‘The Sack ’em Up Men on Screen: Body-Snatching Goes to the Movies’

4pm – Dan Pietersen – ‘Follow Me, and I Will be Thy Guide: A Day-Trip to Dante’s Inferno’

5pm – Johannes Evans – ‘Buttoned Up Tight: Gothic Themes in Costume Design’

6pm – Raquel Souza – ‘Latin Final Girls’

7pm – Sam Hirst – Reimagining Jane: The (Queer) Afterlives of Jane Eyre

8pm – B. Rae Grosz – Writing Workshop – ‘Limnal Spaces; or, Lakes and How To Haunt Them’

9 pm – Paul Riddell – Meat-Eating Greenery: An Overview of Carnivorous Plants

Want to check out my slides in advance? Click:

Are you looking to do a bit of study in 2026, but not sure where to start? If you're interested in Romance fiction, and the history thereof, there is a short online course running soon out of the University of Liverpool, by the fantastic Dr Sam Hirst.

Details from the page at the link:

Falling in love with love: A History of Popular Romance

10 weekly sessions online, on Wednesdays at 6 - 7.30pm, starting from Wednesday 21 January.

Overview

This course comprises a weekly 1.5 hour live online meeting (via Zoom) and online learning materials for you to engage with before and after each live session.

This module will explore the evolution of romance writing from the 18th century to the current day, looking not only at the novel but at the intertwined relationship between the romance novel and cinema. Romance is a much maligned genre but this module will seek to develop its rich history, a range of critical approaches to romance material, and give students insight into the way romance writing has influenced and been influenced by other genres in writing, on screen and beyond!

The course aims to offer students an overview of popular romance history. It will enable participants to use a variety of critical perspectives to explore romance. It will develop participants’ skills in close reading and in working with popular genres.

This course is aimed at romance readers and anyone who wants to explore the best-selling genre and most influential genre in publishing. Each week there will be a set text but extracts will also be provided as we are aware that participants will need to prioritise their reading.

Syllabus

Amatory Fiction: 18th-Century Women Writing Desire

Text: Eliza Haywood, Fantomina (1724)

The Society Romance: Austen and her Legacy

Text: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

Pride and Prejudice (BBC, 1995, dir. Simon Langton)

The Rise of the Byronic Hero

Text: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)

Orientalism and the Romance

Text: E. M. Hull, The Sheik (1919)

The Sheik (dir. Melford, US, 1921)

The Regency Romance

Text: Georgette Heyer, The Quiet Gentleman (1951)

The Reluctant Widow (Knowles, UK, 1950)

Mills and Boon, Category Romance and the 'Nursies'

Betty Neels, Tabitha in Moonlight (1972)

Race and Romance

Beverley Jenkins, Indigo (1996)

The Romantic Comedy and Second Chance Romance

Texts: The Philadelphia Story (dir. George Cukor, US, 1940)

The Lovebirds (dir. Michael Showalter, US, 2020)

Queering the Romance

Text: Olivia Waite, Hen Fever (2020)

Romantasy, Mixed Genres, and the future(s) of Romance

Text: Tasha Suri, The Isle of the Silver Sea (2025)

Course lecturer

Dr Sam Hirst completed their PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University and later turned this research into their first book Theology in the Early British and Irish Gothic, 1764-1834. They are currently working on a book on demonic representation in Gothic fiction. They have published and spoken widely on the Gothic, popular romance, and theologies of the supernatural. They run the weekly lecture programme Romancing the Gothic which invites expert speakers from around the world on all topics more or less Gothic. They are also a regular collaborator with Newstead Abbey, Byron's ancestral home, and the Bronte Parsonage. They have taught English at the universities of Liverpool. Sheffield, Manchester Metropolitan and Oxford Brookes and have conducted post-doctoral research on Byron's life and legacy at the University of Nottingham.

Course fee

Standard fee: £155

Concession fee: £80

Romancing Wuthering Heights

If a full course is too much, then Dr Hirst is also running a one-off lecture about Wuthering Heights, to line up with the release of the new film! Dr Hirst has worked with the Bronte parsonage, and has a wealth of knowledge about the topic

Standard ticket: £15

Concession ticket: £10

I very rarely promote external programming on this blog, but I think this is a very fun, interesting, and worthwhile course being run by Dr Hirst, and I know from other lecture series that their teaching is always top-notch.

If you can afford the course, or lecture, please do sign up, if you can't, then you can check out Dr Hirst's online education project Romancing the Gothic, through their Youtube channel, and watch a back catalogue of HUNDREDS of free lectures on a plethora of different topics in gothic fiction and related fields!

The weekly free lecture series is ongoing, anyone can sign up using this link: https://romancingthegothic.com/class-schedules/

The 2026 roster has already been posted, but if you know anyone who would like to present a talk about Thai gothic, then tell them to keep an eye out for the next time there's a call for speakers, because there would absolutely be interest in a talk like that!

It’s either one of those tropes that has no real world basis, but looks/sounds cool in storytelling and is useful for moving the plot along (see: torture, knocking someone unconscious, a lot of medieval fantasy government stuff)

-Drills. So many drills. Just doing the same motion, or set of motions, over and over and over until it's muscle memory. And then do it some more. These can be done with another person, so you can get a feel for hitting someone (else's sword), or they might be done to a dummy, or just to the air as part of a series of steps

-there is a surprising amount of reading! A lot of what we do is based on styles that originated in the 11th-15th centuries, and were literally written in manuals for future people to use. Sometimes the explanations and diagrams are very clear. Sometimes they are not.

- There is sparring, with variations on goals. Sometimes the goal is just 'hit each other'. Sometimes you will have specific caveats, like if you both deliver a 'killing blow' at the same time you have to run to opposite ends of the room and back

- Footwork drills

- lots of wrist and arm stretches, both with and without swords

- Moving through different blocks/base positions, and practicing different cuts from each position

- More drills, wearing armor or other appropriate gear

- Weights and cardio training! Both are extremely important for making sure you can 1. Swing your sword and 2. Keep swinging your sword when you're wearing 15 lbs of armor and have been hacking at people for a full 20 minutes

- Learning how to maintain your gear

- Practicing control of the blade- this is usually done by having a dummy target (or sometimes a real person), and swinging with full power but stopping before you actually make contact. Master swordsman can bring their blade within half an inch of their target.

- Even more drills

Footwork drills are really important! Learning how and when to move, and shift your weight on your feet, is crucial

When practicing solo I often do so in front of a full-length mirror so that I can actually see what I'm doing

There is also just a lot of sparring. Unfortunately you can't really get good at sword fighting without getting your butt kicked. A lot.

However! A good teacher will give you tips either during or after the fight, or both! A lot of the time it's things like 'you need to improve your footwork more, here are 10 different drills. Go do them.' However, there is also a fair bit of going back over certain 'plays' in slower motion, where they'll tell you exactly what you did wrong and how to fix it in the context of the fight.

Also, just as a side note, unless your character is the progeny of a wealthy lord, they are probably going to use borrowed equipment. It will not fit right. And it will reek with the stench of 1000 sweaty people. And if you train in it enough, when you do get your own gear that actually fits properly and only smells like your sweat, I swear you get 5x better overnight

At some point, everyone develops their own style. I've fought people who love to just make huge stabby lunges, people who make wild flourishes, big guys who just brute force it, guys who look like they'd blow away in a light breeze but are the fastest people you've ever met. It comes over time, and from learning as many different techniques as you can

Not sure how much they did this in Ye Olden Days but almost everyone I've met in HEMA now fights in at least two different styles (usually longsword and Sabre or rapier). As I said above, the more styles you learn, the better you get at all of them; many techniques that you learn from one style are applicable in some way to the other

Spent today wandering around the Palace of Phaistos playing the People Flow game.

Without knowing very much about a space, can you walk around it working out how guests would use it, how servants would navigate it, how different demographics might experience it?

What if you switched up your assumptions about what is IMPORTANT about it? What would the focal points be for a culture that prizes hospitality versus a culture that prizes status and the demonstration of status?

What happens if your culture prizes hospitality but expresses this through playing games with their guests rather than feeding them (what sort of society would this be??? What does it say about food scarcity and food stability?)

You could play this game by creating a floorplan or by downloading a totally random one from Zoopla or similar, or by using the floorplan of where you live, and pretending to know nothing about it except its shape.

If you then tweak some ideological points about how you use the space, how might that floorplan work for your fantasy society, or does it simply stop making sense? Could people easily navigate it or would they really struggle to use the space provided? How might they modify the floorplan to make it makes sense for the way they use the space?

Just some ideas! And now some bonus pics of the Palace of Phaistos (Crete)

there's nothing wrong with writing a short story! there are lots of good short stories that revolve around Interesting Ideas. What if I was my own mother. What if fish people were real and also (evil) living in massachusetts. What if you were your own worst enemy, literally. lots of good short stories there, all at just the right length for a cool idea. no one is going to go see the feature-length adaptation of William Wilson though, because that's it. unless you add in a tragic backstory and a love interest and so on and unfortunately there are a lot of novels and movies running around out there that clearly were meant to be a short story before someone took them and stretched them to a silly length.

your short story doesn't even have to be short! herman melville wrote over 100 pages of a guy who hated his job so much he died of being a hater the end. good show, herman. thank you

death of the author is not 'miku wrote this'

I don't think you have to read either essay to grasp the basic concepts

death of the author means that once a work is complete, what the author believes it to mean is irrelevant to critical analysis of what's in the text. it means when analysing the meaning of a text you prioritise reader interpretation above author intention, and that an interpretation can hold valid meaning even if it's utterly unintentional on the part of the person who created the thing. it doesn't mean 'i can ignore that the person who made this is a bigot' - it may in fact often mean 'this piece of art holds a lot of bigoted meanings that the author probably wasn't intentionally trying to convey but did anyway, and it's worth addressing that on its own terms regardless of whether the author recognises it's there.' it's important to understand because most artists are not consciously and vocally aware of all the possible meanings of their art, and because art is communal and interpretive. and because what somebody thinks they mean, what you think somebody means, and what a text is saying to you are three entirely different things and it's important to be able to tell the difference.

If your dialog feels flat, rewrite the scene pretending the characters cannot at any cost say exactly what they mean. No one says “I’m mad” but they can say it in 100 other ways.

Wrote a chapter but you dislike it? Rewrite it again from memory. That way you’re only remembering the main parts and can fill in extra details. My teacher who was a playwright literally writes every single script twice because of this.

Don’t overuse metaphors, or they lose their potency. Limit yourself.

"Kill your darlings" means "if something is holding you back, get rid of it, even if it sounds pretty."

That's it! That's all it means! It means if you're stuck and stalled out on your story and you could fix the whole block by removing something but you're avoiding removing that thing because it's good, you remove that thing. That's the darling.

It does NOT mean

That you have to get rid of your self-indulgent writing

That you should delete something just because you like it (?wtf?)

That you need to kill off characters (??? what)

That you have to pare your story down to the absolute bare bones

That you have to delete anything whatsoever if you don't want to

The POINT is that you STOP FEELING GUILTY for throwing out good writing that isn't SERVING THE STORY.

The POINT is that you don't get so HUNG UP on the details that you lose sight of the BIG PICTURE.

lots of authors have been posting great pieces of advice for up and coming buckaroos and i agree with so much of it. GREAT RESOURCES right now so i thought i would add my own. usually i use words like scoundrel but for meanings sake i will just be direct: dont make being an asshole your brand

let me preface this by saying it should be taken with HUGE grain of salt, you can do whatever you want buckaroo its YOUR art and your personal expression. to be honest i often refrain from ‘advice’ because id rather simply tell what works for me, but i feel like this one is pretty universal.

i am in incredibly rare position to have come up in TWO MAJOR CREATIVE INDUSTRIES and reached ‘traditionally published’ or ‘major film studio contract’ level completely separate from each other, without connections between, and this is ABSOLUTELY a massive factor in the buckaroos who trot long term

there is always a sort of incoming class of buds who rise up, and inevitably a few of them will seem to WANT to make enemies with everyone around them the second they have even the smallest voice. i UNDERSTAND in the sense that we have these legendary jerk artists in our culture. HOWEVER

1 those artists generally let their asshole flag fly AFTER they reached the top and 2 if not, it was a different time, there is simply not enough money in the creative fields for major creative entities to tolerate talented up and coming assholes. it is FINANCIALLY a different timeline now

EVEN SO you can point to a few old big timers who are notorious assholes but i would say its important to consider JUST HOW BIG WOULD THEY BE IF THEY WERE ALSO KIND. what if they were that talented AND watched out for their buds? heres what happened to the 'jerk brands' i trotted up with personally

every single one of them got intoxicated by the identity of being mean or ‘just tellin it like it is’ and then fell directly onto their face. the only ones who escaped were those who started that way on the trot up and IMMEDIATELY pulled it together and stopped and changed course

i know it might seem obvious to many reading this but you would be SHOCKED how many buds thinks it is a COOL IDENTITY to cultivate. some will probably subtweet this haha but listen bud, the directors you trash SEE IT. publishers DONT NEED TO TOLERATE TALENTED ASSHOLES ANYMORE THERES NOT ENOUGH MONEY

important reminder that i am talkin on artists who are PUBLICLY assholes, who trash talk their classmates or their fans. the ones who EMBRACE THIS IDENTITY as a sort of flag to wave because it gets them attention. theres plenty of SECRET assholes who find success, unfortunately. that is other topic

it is also important to say that FIGHTING THE POWERS THAT BE or protesting the scoundrels of the world is not being an asshole. KINDNESS CAN BE STRONG AND DIRECT AND POWERFUL. we need kind, strong buckaroos these days. it is not a weakness to love, and you should speak up for those who need it

so what can be done? what happens if you are reading this post and thinking ‘oh heck i can feel myself falling into asshole trap?’ well as a first reminder you can do anything you want bud, HAVE AT IT because i am not telling you this for MY sake, but if you want some actual advice id say this:

just being kind is MUCH easier than it seems, it only takes a little effort to reach out to your buds, to help, to encourage, to assistant, to talk about how much you liked someones film or song or book. jealousy or frustration are NATURAL feelings, but you dont have to let them run the show.

you MAY have to mourn the times an author couldve reached out for a book event that never happened because you turned them into an enemy. or a record executive read the stuff you said in some interview and pulled the soundtrack slot that was waiting for you on their desk. but IT IS NEVER TOO LATE

Mapping Your Market

Ok so if you're writing a market scene, and your characters are wandering around stalls, have a think about why a market is set out in a specific way. If you've been to markets before, especially ones in the UK with medieval charters, you'll notice the market square might be set out in a particular way, or that things used to be in set out in specific quadrants or corners years ago and are more ad hoc now.

What market will you base yours on? Are there permanent structures used in the market, or is everything transitory?

The climate might determine if structures are used or not and what they look like, as it may be important to have the market, or at least, a lot of it, in shade, or undercover due to wet or cold conditions.

Or, it could be simple, like raised stages, and some stalls are on these.

If live animals and poultry are present, they might not be in cages or pens, but corralled inside a pre-existing structure with a wall around it, like a medieval poultry cross.

There may be a path or public right of way through the middle of the square, maybe at a diagonal from one corner to another, where stall holders aren't technically supposed to set up stalls on.

This may originally have been the route to get livestock in and out, or the path pedestrians take so they don't get in the way of said livestock.

You usually have all your animals in one place, and butchery happens right there as well, so the street is literally running with blood and shit. Then you have your fish - same deal. You do not want your textiles next to all that. You put them a bit further away. You can also have a range of shops and taverns around the market square, and it's fairly normal to have multiple taverns next to each other as they can take the footfall.

Not all will be inns with somewhere to stay, some will just be drinking establishments, and some you'll get food in as well.

More than a Market

Markets themselves can be staples of a town's way of life. Stopping them is a massive deal. There can also be a sense of civic pride around the market - for example, Salisbury's City Hall is on the market square, and the market doesn't stop or close just because a new mayor is being sworn in. The red carpet is rolled out, there's a brass band and a parade, and right next to the carpet is the grocery stall with the vendor screaming "STRAWBERRIES, A POUND!!!!" and "RASPBERRIES £2 A PUNNET!!!!!!" to be heard over the trombones somberly playing Gustav Holst. That market barely closed for the Black Death, it's not being stopped for some guy in a hat.

Similarly, if your characters are in town for a civic occasion, it wouldn't be weird to have the market on at the same time - it just means more footfall, and it might help to build a picture of the area's politics, and deepen the worldbuilding so you can drop hints about the wider world and wider region through the stalls and vendors and demographics who have come into town for different reasons.

Whose Market?

Markets don't just magically happen or appear, they're organised. By whom? This comes down to your political set-up. Who runs the town? Whoever runs the town, licences the market. They get rent from the stalls, or a fee. If there's a market, you may also find toll bridges set up around the town so that goods coming in by river have to pay a toll that then goes towards the upkeep of the riverbanks (flood defences) and the bridges (access routes) and roads. Someone is also usually profiting from this as well - who?

In the Middle Ages, the right to have a market licence was something a bishop could hold, not just a secular thing. Here's an example from Salisbury (known then as New Sarum, as Old Sarum is a hillfort with a castle and cathedral on top, and New Sarum moved down to the confluence of 5 rivers, as it didn't need to be in such a defensive position anymore, it was expanding rapidly, the bishop didn't want the secular lord to be able to throw a stone out of his bedroom window and hit the cathedral - they really were built that close together due to the size of the hilltop they are on - and rivers mean access to trade.

Market Etiquette & Norms

You can play a lot with trade and market stalls - you can use this to show off your world and create a wider sense of it, what goods are expensive and rare, what are usual sights, what entertainment is present, what are the children doing?

Also think about the smells (not all pleasant, not all unpleasant), the memories your characters would have of markets, or their attitudes to them if it's their first time at one. If they've never been to market before, why not, and how do they usually get their goods if they don't go to a weekly market to buy things?

What is "normal" behaviour at a market? What sort of unhinged behaviour wouldn't make anyone bat an eyelid, as they've seen it all before?

What dangers are there to look out for?

Loads more questions to ask, but I'll leave it there for now.

Too many writers are using generative 'AI' to make their book covers, so I've written a guide on how to make your own cover for free or cheap without turning to a machine.

If you can't afford to pay an artist, you CAN make your own!