Blog About Sam's Thoughts And Riting Diary

While The Donald and Kim J trade insults bringing forward the world's end I have been learning about Typesetting. Actual footage of me During a talk this week, the guest speaker spoke (what are the chances?) about the role of typesetting within the publishing industry and it piqued my curiosity. Somehow I have read thousands of books and never noticed that both margins line up. It's a fine art of manipulating spaces between letters and words in order to create a body of text that is fully justified . After looking at my latest piece of flash fiction sellotaped to the wall, I immediately realised how hideous the right margin looked. When I typed the work up on my typewriter I just ended each line before I ran out of space. "Flush left" - Amateur Initially I thought I would just play it by ear and try to manually line up the right margin as I typed. Before I even began I realised that would have been incredibly frustrating and involve loads of ugly h

Writing about numbers is hardly appealing to my target audience but this blog is a shameless promotion of my self-indulgence so here we are. I've been really good at mental arithmetic for as long as I could count. This skill has left me wondering of its origin and how "gifts" (and things of the sort) work. "No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch." - Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene The 10,000 hour theory is fascinating and well worth reading up on, though there are many that disagree with the principle. For me, it isn't a case of whether 10,000 hours of what Matthew Syed ambiguously terms "purposeful practice" will guarantee world-class status, rather it is the mindset that takes my interest. In his book 'Bounce', Syed advocates the Growth mindset over the Fixed mindset. Adopting the Growth mind

With the Great British summer drawing to its conclusion (I shall refrain from making the  tired old joke), I wanted to reflect on my summer of writing. After finishing university in early April (lol), and with only one exam to prepare for, I set myself the summer task of writing 'Idle Riot'. The inception of the story came two or three years ago and it's been in the back of my mind ever since. Initially I wrote a chapter but, as I wasn't certain of the story and the direction I wanted to take it in, I then put it on hold. The protagonist of Idle Riot is a lazy, irritable, middle-aged man named Ian Dolent. As with pretty much everything I write, there's a fair amount of autobiographical detail and I like to think the pedant in me exists within Ian. There have been multiple occasions when I've found myself in a situation where I have thought, "I know exactly what Ian would do/think right now". I don't know whether other writers carry around th