The Chopping Blog

Every January, writers make the same promise: This is the year I finish the book.

This year, let’s win the war ⚔️

"Elai envied the pigs."

"I’m taking a shit when a fist bangs on the steel door and the hatch snaps open."

"When I was thirteen, I had a crush on Osama bin Laden."

Apart from the widescale intellectual property theft that led to the creation of generative AI, there is a simple reason why your slop sucks: because it is devoid of humanity.

Red herrings are only half the job. The real clues also have to appear on the page, and the reader needs a fair chance to notice them. The trick is to make them easily overlooked.

A big congratulations to our client J.L Thorpe on the release of her novel A Corruption of Memory

The point of no return makes the detective care more about solving the case, which in turn increases the reader’s commitment.

Almost all mystery fiction is built around three investigatory goals: means, motive, and opportunity. This Sherlockian trinity has been handed down through a century of detective novels.

Catch David & Michelle as they chat about editing, getting published, and their many ongoing projects.

For a book to be a thriller it just has to be… thrilling, right?

The universal, whether set two years or five centuries in the past, is always triangulating humanity in the here and now.