* Bestselling * Award Winning * Indie
They don't publish
the good news.
The good news is published
by us.
We have a special edition every moment,
and we need you to read it.
The good news is that you are alive,
and the linden tree is still there,
standing firm in the harsh winter.
The good news is that you have
I used to do long-distance running and whenever I hit a wall, I would think of Haruki Murakami quoting Guatama Buddha on the difference between inevitable and optional: ‘Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
‘Say you’re running and you start to think, Man this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The hurt part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand any more is up to [you].'
Here are ten more inevitables and an optional mindset with which you can meet each of them.
Or not.
Giving is at the heart of the creative approach. You give something of yourself – sometimes for payment, often not. 
Sometimes knowing exactly why, often not.
This blog post is my once-a-year callout, where you get the opportunity to intentionally give — by supporting a vulnerable person who, because of famine or war or genocide or some other trauma, is struggling.
This is where I ask if you have enjoyed or received any other benefit from the Go Creative! blog this year, whether you might
“Being creative is a full-time job with its own daily patterns. That's why writers, for example, like to establish routines for themselves.
The most productive
ones get started early in the morning, when the world is quiet, the phones aren't ringing, and their minds are rested, alert, and not yet polluted by other people's words.
“They might
With the help of the good folk at PaperLi, I'm now curating The Creative Times.
In this daily epublication, I aim to gather the very best writing and broadcasting about the very best creative work from around the English speaking world.
Today's issue has:
In the early 1990s, three psychologists visited Universitat der Kunste, the esteemed arts academy in West Berlin, to study a cohort of elite
violin students and see what made them so very good.
As a control group, they selected students from the education department training to be music teachers. Though this group were also serious about the violin, their playing ability was more average.
What the researchers wanted to understand was why. Was there a shared behaviour among the members of each group that made the excellent players better? Were they more
Fostering Flow Tip #17. Become a “master of perfect indiscipline” and stay in bed. By Siddhartha Mukherjee. 
“I sat in the room every evening staring at the wall, writing nothing. Three weeks went by, and not a single worthwhile paragraph oozed out. I moved myself to the living room couch, and spent the day staring into the garden. Nothing.
“The dining room table, with the books spread out around me. Nothing.
“I went to sleep one evening, having produced another day of nothing. I woke up at about three in the morning, lying in bed, with my pillow propped up, and wrote four pages.
“The trick to my writing, it turned out, was
AFTER THE RISING. EPISODE SIX: I'm No Traitor
The story so far: Jo Devereux is back in Mucknamore, the Irish seaside village where she grew up, for her mother’s funeral. In her
will, her mother’s has bequeathed a pile of family papers and asked Jo to write about her family’s part in the Irish liberation struggle. Jo is fascinated by what she finds in these papers. But what part did her family really play in that struggle? Why did Dan O'Donovan die? And what does it all mean for her relationship with Rory O’Donovan, Dan's nephew, whom she swore she'd never let back into her life?
You can read previous chapters HERE.
They are unmaking the house. From the door of the shed, I stand and watch the diggers trundle their mechanical dance around the building: forwards and backwards, claws up, claws down, buckets full, buckets empty. Drills puncture the walls and bricks that have supported each other for more than a hundred years fall apart.
On and on it goes, day after day. Inside, steel struts brace the structure they want to retain, stop the whole from collapsing.
I watch the work from my cowshed. Here is where I live now, inside a strange
AFTER THE RISING. EPISODE FIVE: GOING UNDER
The story so far: Jo Devereux is back in Mucknamore, the Irish seaside village where she grew up, for her mother's funeral. In her will, her mother’s has bequeathed a pile of family papers and asked her to write about her family's part in the Irish liberation struggle in 1922. It might suit Jp to stay on and take refuge from the raddled life she's been living in San Francisco since her friend Richard died. But how can she, now that the family pub and shop is to be sold? And when Rory O’Donovan, the only man she ever really loved, still lives there with his wife and children and seems to think they can be friends?
You can read previous chapters HERE.
Now Read On: After Rory’s gone I go to the sitting room and slide the pictures of my eighteen-year-old self out of their envelope, to look again at this girl with her unlined face and body, to look and look until I can’t see her image any more, until it blurs and clears and mists again. At some point I fall asleep staring into her wildly glittering eyes.
I wake with
The story so far: Jo Devereux is back in Mucknamore, the Irish seaside village where she grew up. Her 
mother's dying request is that she will stay on and write a family history, from the pile of family papers she's bequeathed her about the Irish liberation struggle in 1922. Life back in San Francisco is not ideal for Jo but how can she stay on in Mucknamore, when she has never fitted in? And when Rory O’Donovan, the only man she ever really loved, lives there with his wife and children and seems to think they can now be friends, despite all that happened.
You can read previous chapters HERE.
Now READ ON:
Over, yes. But now this compulsion to write about it and live it again. And I have to start with that awful night in San Francisco with Dee, just before I heard that Mrs D. was dying.
I don’t want to remember myself, walking along the solid city sidewalk, through air thickening with the smell of food. Or Dee and I, sitting at our usual table outside Benton’s, heads leaning into each other over bowls of pasta, while the sky faded from blue to purple, and lights sprang on across the city, their sense of promise making me ache, so that the night stretched
The story so far: Jo Devereux has returned to Mucknamore, the Irish seaside village where she grew up, for her mother's funeral after an absence of 20 years. There she reconnects with her sister Maeve and her ex-boyfriend, Rory O'Donovan, the only man she has ever loved, who caused the rift between her and her family. Now read on:
‘So, Dev,’ he says, after my sister has made her excuses and scuttled away. ‘What’s going on? Why are you receiving us in bed, like a courtesan? You don’t look sick to me. You look better than ever.’
As he’s talking, he’s pulling out the chair from the corner and bringing it over, close to the bed. ‘Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to. Lying low, avoiding the mob. Avoiding me too, you brat.’
Brat-sh. The soft Irish T. He sounds so Wexford to my ears now, such a strong streak of Mucknamore in his accent: the nasal vowels, the singing rise and fall to his sentences. But of course it’s my speech that has changed, not his. I am stuck again by the newness of him, the short hair that makes him look unfinished.
‘It’s all a bit Mucknamore for me.’
‘I knew it.’
‘I hear you’re a full fledged resident now.’ I speak as if I only heard today, as if Maeve and Dee, my Wexford friend who also lives in SF, hadn’t passed on everything they knew about him since I left. ‘Was the progressive liberalism that drew you? Or the cultural stimulation?’
‘No need to sneer, city girl. It’s a good place to live.’
I raise my brows into a question. The Rory I knew could not have
I. Ocean Pulse
Rising, curling, foam unfurling,
waves of cold Atlantic sea,
next one coming, meet it running,
plunge into the safe beneath.
Avoid crashing, hard sand-smashing
that could knock me to my knees.
Out here holding. Look I’m floating!
Blood-beat drumming in my ears.
Waves keep surging, endless burgeon
sent up from the darkest deeps,
surface playing, breath delaying,
I dive into your mystery,
always saying all to me.
II. Here is Where
I've been here
before but
now I’m here
for healing.
Twice times ill
with cancer
and its cure
here is where
I’ve come. Numb
beneath – or
should I say
beyond? – these,
my extremities.
I've been here
before but
now I’m here
for healing.
III. Seeing Eye
I’m rocked in salt arms: the ocean,
waves pillowing under my head.
The sky’s eye seems to wink open
to glint all I seek to reflect.
For one glittering, infinite instant
I can’t tell the fall from the swell.
Become a patron today and please accept my endless appreciation for your support and encouragement … and for your love of poetry.
More poetry HERE
The story so far: Jo Devereux has returned to Mucknamore, the Irish seaside village where she grew up, for her mother's funeral after an absence of 20 years. There she reconnects with her sister Maeve, brother-in-law Donal, niece Ria and – to her great surprise – Rory O'Donovan, once the love of her life and the last person she expected to see at a Devereux funeral. Now read on:
Donal explains that we are to stand behind the hearse and lead the cortège down to the old cemetery. Only when he says this do I look across and realize: my father’s grave lies flat and undisturbed.
‘Let me guess: another special request?’
‘Yep. She’s to be buried with her own family.’
Not with Daddy. I’m surprised she braved the scandal of that, dead or alive.
‘And according to the grand plan, we all have to walk there.’
To the old cemetery? That’s down almost as far as Rathmeelin, the next village up the coast. In this heat? I doubt I’ll be able to make it. But now here’s Maeve bustling across, aggravated-big-sister expression in place. ‘Am I supposed to say,
Because I've just been given an exciting new screenwriting opportunity (of which more anon)… and 
because, as advised by Joanna last week, I need to have my published novels e-reader-ready for Christmas… and because I'm also publishing a poetry book this month…, I find I have to put Skin Diving on hold.
This hurts. I've spent days resisting. Firstly, your feedback told me you were enjoying the chapter-by-chapter, Friday fiction slot. So was I.
And I've been carrying this story about the MacIntyre family for years. A part of me, a very big part of me, wants more than anything to write this book. That's why I started serialising it in the first place.
But I've learned enough about the creative process to know
IN AUTUMN OF 1916, Iseult Gonne sent a long letter to her friend and mentor, WB Yeats, in which she referred to his recent critique of 
her writing: “I am most thankful to you for those criticisms you have made on my scribblings,” she wrote. “Yes, they are bad. I knew it all the while and I am glad of what you say about truth and beauty. I will try and put it into practice . . . but just now I am still too tired to work.”
Too tired to work. When I first came upon those words, as part of research I was doing into Gonne’s life, I felt like weeping. Yes, the writing she was doing at the time could sometimes be
