Improbable Press Blog

By Atlin Merrick Like you I walk, I wait, and sometimes I want to learn cool stuff while I do that, which is why I love podcasts.99% Invisible is a brilliant podcast which recently discussed radical transparency.For example, if the city government takes a year to process building permits tell people. Giving people a hook to hang their wait on helps the wait pass more peacefully. Which leads us to this: How Long It Takes to Edit a Book (and What the Heck That Means) With radical transparency in mind, and inspired by a writer who recently asked me "what...

By Atlin Merrick I visited the Long Room in Trinity College Dublin recently.Look at that photo. Imagine being in this room that contains 200,000 books, a single example of every book published in Ireland and Britain between 1801 and about 1880. While Jane Austen is there in that room, while the Brontës are there too you know, you know that most of the voices in that beautiful room, bound inside covers of gold-stamped leather, are the voices of men, as are every one of the fifty-one busts lining its 65 metres.In that library and libraries the world over men of...

The first in a series of writing prompts for your inspiration, shared every Thursday. Feel free to share anything at all, fandom, original, a poem, an ode, whatever you're inspired, share in the comments below (moderated to control the bots), or just run off into a meadow and together you and the pic can share your love in the sunshine. Or! Even better! Take it and build something from it on AO3 or in your writing workshop or wherever! Either. Or. All? All is good. Shall we begin? More Writing Prompts Eye of the BeholderAll It Takes

...well, the subject line either caught your eye or brought up your bile. So either you're welcome or I'm sorry. However there's a point and that's this… Urine, Fiction & Non-Fiction Writing As writers we sometimes think we know stuff. Like we all "know" urine is sterile (nope, it's not), and maybe we've had our sea captain hollering "I'll stop the pain o' the fierce Lion's Mane jelly, me laddy," as she pees on the laddy, but no no nope, urine very much won't. The point is that reality's ever so much more interesting than these things we think we...

I absolutely can't read how-to books about writing. It's like asking a caterpillar how she manages to control all those legs. Do that and, if she stops to think about it, she may never move again. Ever.So reading books about writing does not help me with writing, unless help is defined by overwhelming ennui and a need to binge Great British Bake-Off. So. Instead I read a lot of books about the things I write about. When I was writing Sherlock Holmes stories for breakfast, lunch, and after-dinner dessert, I adored books about science, such as: * The Science of...