Having just followed her on Instagram and read all of her books, I greatly appreciate Sarah J. Maas’ account as an accomplished writer. She has got three different book series: A court of Thorns and Roses (ACOTAR), Throne of Glass (TOG) and Crescent City.

I believe that social media, and especially Instagram are great ways of putting oneself out there, especially when it comes to building an audience or maintaining a community of readers – in the case of an author. But I’ve got to admit that Sarah J. Maas has maintained and is still keeping up an amazing Social Media presence, her Instagram bio accurately describing who she is and what she has done in just five short rows – her name, then contouring the fact that she is a best-selling author, and the titles of all three of her novel series. Besides that, she has got a useful link to her website which allows not only her 1.7 million followers to access more of the ‘Sarah J. Maas’ universe, as I like to call it, but also anyone who happens to visit her page.

Another very important aspect that I think adds a lot to her profile is the fact that she has created so many informative highlights, each of them bearing the title of one of her books or whatever information is contained within. However, after analysing these more in-depth, I realised that although these highlights exist, they are not updated correctly. Her ‘newest release’ highlight contains a single, blurred photo of one of her books that was released four years ago, part of a series that has now reached its 3rd book. More than that, most of her other highlights date back to 2021 or earlier, which also gives the impression that she is not as keen on thoroughly updating her page. 

In terms of her posts, pretty much all of them revolve around her books and writing. This is especially important as it is clear that her Instagram page is only dedicated to that, rather than her personal life – despite the occasional baby photo! There are a lot of photos containing quotes or small excerpts from her books which allow her new audience to dive in just briefly and have a little insight into what this multiverse is. Yet even to me, as an older reader these quotes only remind me of the beauty of her books, and therefore inspire me to read her books again. She has currently got 628 posts, at the time of this review, and follows only 130 people – most of them being high-profile politicians, writers, hotels and so on. These highlight her interests as a writer and show, more than anything, how serious she is not only as a person but as a high-profile writer herself. 

Overall, I would definitely say that Sarah J. Maas’ Instagram page is well-organised, despite some minor details that could be changed or updated. It effectively highlights who she is in terms of her career, what she has written, what her interests are and she manages to maintain a constant social media presence through her posts which, therefore, keeps the audience and readers connected to the author.

Poor Things is a comedy sci-fi Oscar nominated movie directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, and it’s based on Alasdair Grey’s book which was published in 1992.

In my opinion, it’s the brilliant plot that makes the film interesting, alongside a star-sudden cast composed by Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, William Dafoe and Margaret Qualley.

It can be described as an organized fever dream, which takes place in London during the Victorian Era, such as a sort of modern Frankenstein but characterized by a woman. What is it about: Bella Baxter is a young woman brought back to life by Dr. Godwin Baxter. She was born from an experiment by its creator, who implanted the brain of a suicidal woman’s fetus that she was carrying in her womb into the body of Bella. Bella is therefore reborn with the intelligence of a newborn, ready and quick to learn, she grows and makes progress under the tutelage of Dr. Baxter, who wants his creature to develop a free mind from prejudice and open to all types of knowledge. 

Soon, however, Bella, driven by her strong desire to discover the world, runs away with Duncan Wedderburn, a shrewd and dissolute lawyer, for an overwhelming adventure that takes her around Europe, until she acquires self-awareness.

I enjoyed how Bella’s growth journey leads her to confront her own prejudices and those of others, challenging social conventions and opening up new experiences and relationships. Next to her, Mark Ruffalo offers a delightfully ambiguous interpretation of a male character who finds himself confronting a new reality, questioning his own role in society.

I was mesmerized by the costumes, the acting, the comic relief, the philosophy, the filmography, the directing, it was truly art and worthy of an Oscar’s nomination. My favorite scene was the one where Bella is taken to Alexandria. That’s when Bella first finds out about the suffering that comes with human existence by looking at the poor people and their dead children. Her worldview is completely shattered, yet pain and suffering are the most fundamental parts of personhood and she must acquire them.

I personally think that the film offers a profound reflection on the human condition and the dynamics of power between the sexes, without ever ending up in didactics or moralism. Unexpectedly, the movie raises deep questions about human nature and social relationships, thanks to witty humor and feminist and social reflections through Bella’s character. And also it explores themes such as personal transformation.

By Alice Testa.

Listening to Aaron Kent talk was one of the most inspiring speaker events I have ever attended, because never before had I heard someone talk so candidly and openly about their past, present and future experiences in the arts. Through his experiences in not only publishing but also writing poetry himself, Aaron shared a multitude of vitally important titbits that would help so many aspiring authors in pursuit of their dreams.

Becoming a better writer by reading

Reading and writing have always gone arm in arm, but I think a lot of aspiring writers are either so confident in their own abilities that they feel as though they don’t need to take advice from existing media, or so anxious that any novel they read sways their writing technique until they’re sent into a panic (me being the latter). But Aaron places significant importance on reading as a way to better your own writing ability. As a man who started out with a very difficult lifestyle and faced many struggles, reading was a way for him to gain a better connection with his writing abilities, and a way for him to influence his own poetry, and I feel like that’s something we should all be doing. The power that other works can have on your own is incredibly important, especially when you’re just starting out.

Being given permission to try

Starting out as a writer, it can be very difficult to find a doorway into the writing world, and it often takes more than one person to make a project reality. Aaron spoke about being given permission to try, which of course takes a group of like minded people willing to give you a chance. Being given permission to try allowed Aaron to do what he needed to do to get his business off the ground. This is the dream for so many writers, and being given permission to at least try poses the starting point for any project.

Works should be available regardless of your situation when it is released

In today’s current climate, there are so many ways in which a person can be deprived. Aaron draws attention specifically to the lack of availability of new works established as limited runs. His ethos encapsulates the idea that publishing a book on a limited run leads to ‘parasitic behaviour.’ This is the literal surge of people in privileged positions that rush to buy books on the release day simply to put them on a shelf and sell them when the value has increased. This whole culture is built around survival of the richest, and Aaron works hard to ensure that everyone has access to both hardback and paperback editions, because books and literature should be available to all in every format.

Reaching out

One thing that Aaron picked up on that I think is so important and so difficult for so many people to do is reaching out for help. The writing world is a tough place to establish yourself, especially if you have no backing from anyone in the game to begin with. Networking is vitally important, but reaching out can sometimes be really hard. Aaron spoke of the benefits of doing so, though, and how it can be such a rewarding experience if you know the right people. Now, Aaron dedicates his life to helping people in less fortunate situations access the beauty of literature, as well as the support they require. There is still so much more we can do, but Aaron is leading the charge to a better future.

Lastly, it is important to remember that teamwork brings dreams alive and, as Aaron said, ‘I had a vision, but my vision got better when it was other people’s vision too.’

Thank you so much!

Charlie Jolly

Lorella Belli has been a successful literary agent for many years, even setting up her own agency. Her recent speaker event was full of really useful insights for people looking to become a literary agent or get their novel published. Lorella bounced around several topics so I’m going to be responding to the points I found most interesting and giving my thoughts on her advice.

“If you want to become a literary agent, think about what you really enjoy doing.”

Lorella continued on this by talking about how you should audit what you enjoy doing, what you’re knowledgeable about, what you have a natural interest in and importantly, what you enjoy reading. Lorella gave the example of how she has a passion for international books/authors and a general interest in other cultures and international news. This sets her up well to represent a diverse cast of authors or even authors whose books have international appeal. I hadn’t considered that certain stories or characters may not be read or allowed in other countries due to a difference in culture or even just the socio-political climate of the time. I feel this advice of ‘audit what you’re interested in’ works well for writers too as it is essentially the same as ‘write what you know.’

“What’s In the Best Seller Section Was Commissioned a Long Time Ago.”

If there was any nugget of advice from this talk that was useful for both aspiring agents and writers, it was this. Lorella gave us examples of books that have recently been commissioned but won’t hit the shelves until late 2024 or early to mid 2025. The general take away she intended from this was for us not to look at the bestseller shelf in our local Waterstones and decide “okay, romance novels about time travelling robots are popular, I’ll write that” because it is likely that by the time you were to write the novel, get it commissioned and finally published; that ship will have sailed and now you’ve just got a really weird novel about robots from 1851 in love.

“It’s Not a 9-5 Job.”

Lorella shared some more personal details about her life when discussing the hours that she works. Lorella advised us to find a partner that is okay with us working unsociable hours, evenings, weekends etc. While this was said with a smile and followed by a laugh, I’m sure she meant it. To take this comment at its basic meaning, she meant: Whether you’re writing or representing writers, you’re signing up for a lot of commitment so be warned, this isn’t your typical 9-5. I think that is great advice for everyone and proves you can only do this kind of work if you’re passionate.

In short, I really enjoyed this talk. Lorella Belli had a super interesting story of how she started in the industry and worked her way up which would have been a compelling enough reason to attend the talk. However, the main prize was all the incredible wisdom she shared about the industry which I know I—and I’m sure the rest of the students—learned a lot from.

Kalum Wilson

By Marianne McBrearty

Anxiety rips through the mind, storms gather inside the thoughts of getting those first words down. The writer then puts up the roadblocks, temporary traffic lights and has all their creativity sitting in traffic waiting for the light to turn green. As the hours and days pass by, even successful writers can extend that traffic queue back years – they might get rid of the electronic traffic lights and employ the hi-vis jacket man with the flip sign that says ‘Go’ ‘Stop’! The weight of the words starts to pile up feelings like concrete they can’t carry anymore, abandoned, if only bulldozers can manoeuvre them. The writer finds ways to delay sitting at the laptop, or open the notebook, as there is always that last episode to watch or that mate who needs some friendly advice tonight – so we might as well go for some drinks. Of course, it helps with the writing, you know meeting people, conversation, you convince yourself, just like you said to yourself last week. 

What is that word ‘Block’ – that has caused terror on the writer’s desk. There are the extremities of writer’s block where a writer can simply decide to abandon their career as a writer, switch course in life or maybe they created the masterpiece so early on not much else flowed the same way after that. Harper Lee spent years in absence of her writing after the success of To Kill A Mockingbird, it would be 55 years later when she released her second novel. Yet to think of the word ‘Block’ as an American English word, the definition is more comforting as the distance from one street to the next. It conjures up families, friendships, lovers, enemies, communities, societies, neighbours, schools, shops, places of worship, hospitals, languages, complete treasures inside every block of the neighbourhood filled with stories for the ambitious writer. The word Block should be embraced. It should be a go-to-place, where writers can search to find their characters, descriptions, and dialogue. They should build their block on their desk, brick by brick, created just as their world will transform onto their page. Whether they are creating a novel, script, poetry – layering each brick, forming what their block will transform into, the characters that live there, the genre, the words then start to seep onto the pages. 

When the artist has control over their blocks, they start to see how its form sits crafted together. For ancient Celt dry stone wall building, crafters used similar techniques to create their walls. With the lack of binding material to set each stone together, they built the bricks together like an artform. They cleverly would look at each shape of the stone and see which ones would sit together, giving the wall its strength, form and shape. They would chisel away at a block to create the shapes needed to fit and build walls with great lengths such as Haiden’s wall in AD117 that it is believed to have taken 6 years in completion. As the Celt stone wall makers, Victor Hugo took 15 years crafting and shaping his writing of Les Misérables, constructing his masterpiece equally with great strength and precision. 

Being a second-year creative writing student at Westminster university means… Yep, you guessed it, I’ve already completed first year. This means that I’ve been lucky enough to hear from a huge variety of working writers in the bi-weekly reflective writing guest speaker events. This was of huge benefit to me (and all the other students I’m sure) as—up until then—I had never met a working writer, in any medium, so hearing about the writing process and the dos and don’ts from people who get paid to write was of more benefit than I have word count to do justice in this blog. Regardless, in this blog I’m going to discuss the speaker that kicked off second years guest speaker events, Katie Hale.

Who is Katie Hale?

Katie is a poet and novelist who earns her income solely through writing, another way to put it would be… She’s living our dream. Though “earning her income solely through writing” isn’t technically true, but I’ll get back to that in a moment. Katie gave an insightful overview into the life of a writer: overcoming writers block, doing your research, balancing the rest of your life with writing, I could go on. However, the reason this talk was so useful—in a practical sense—was because she took the time to give us a thorough review of all her different income streams.

Show Me the Money!

What is this? An economics class?!

No…

That right there is the problem. A lot of people want to work as a writer but a lot of people don’t have the first idea of how much a writer earns, or where their money is really coming from. According to Katie Hale’s pie chart (yes, she had a pie chart) only 17% of her income is coming from writing. Ideally this percentage would creep up the more novels a writer has available for purchase and the more of a name they make for themselves. But in the meantime, Katie earns her income through funding & grants, mentoring other writers, residencies and attending speaker events (like this one). A full list of her income sources can be seen below.

Funding: 42%

Facilitation: 21%

Writing: 17%

Admin: 10%

Events: 7%

Residencies: 3%

While some people may be disheartened by this, discovering that only 17% of a working writer’s income actually comes from writing, I wasn’t. I already knew that it is very difficult to make a living solely as a writer so this wasn’t breaking news. What was breaking news, however, was how Katie has managed to make a living in the industry, in and around writing.

“Writing is a marathon, not a sprint.” As writers, we hear that a lot, but it is usually pertaining to your writing abilities, not how much cash is in your wallet. But, as I see it, the same is true for your earnings. The longer you write, the better you get, the more of a name you make for yourself, the more connections you make, the more projects you can earn royalties from etc. I’d like to thank Katie for a brilliant talk and for renewing my hope that it’s not all doom and gloom for a writers bank account, that it is possible to make a living as a writer without having to make it as a household name.

Hamzeh Ghaderi

As humankind—the most complex evolved creature—we are conscious and have consciousness, meaning we can think before acting, and we can consider different scenarios in our mind and then execute the one that fits the most, as we assume it to be. This is called “free will”. We are free to decide what to do, but this is only when we’re awake. What about when unconscious? Are we still able to make any decisions and be in charge of our lives? The answer is simple: we do not have any power of being in control while sleeping. This is a totally different world— an unknown one—far from the physical one we experience and live in when our eyes are open. It is like a parallel universe. The body is the same, but our thoughts are far away. It’s like traveling spiritually, but at the same time, it is not even that simple to define. It just needs to be imagined differently.

Having this thought, another question arises: has anyone ever tried to control their sleep and dream about their favourite thing? Probably yes, but definitely, they’ve been unsuccessful. It is because when you fall asleep, your brain, the centre of your decision-making, sleeps, too; only one part remains conscious, and that is where dreams are produced in cooperation with the unconscious mind.

   Now, aware of this and also knowing that some dreams only last a few seconds in our short memory and then they vanish, are you keen to remember them? Well, I think not everyone actually is, but for me, it’s essential to know what I’ve seen, which places I’ve visited, and who has been in my company during that period.

Now, let’s enter this world of dreams through another door, shall we? Though before we go, let me tell you why I call dreaming “being in another world”? It is because dreaming consists of one-third of our lives. Yes, that’s true. Approximately one-third of each person’s life (eight hours out of twenty-four) is spent lying in their warm beds and sleeping, meaning they are entirely deaf from hearing what’s happening in the conscious world.

   The world of dreams doesn’t follow the Fundamental Interactions (gravity, electromagnetism, weak interaction, and strong interaction) as if it is in a different loop with distinct rules that disobey space-time. It has basically no rules. How strange! It can be brutal and unbelievable from an outer (conscious) perspective. Let me explain more! In a possible circumstance, when you fall asleep and wake up in the world of dreams, you may end up in a cold, tight cell for a long time and stay there powerless and feel suffocated, shiver in the cold, get hungry or thirsty, and no one would be around to release you or at least help you survive—I basically call this a nightmare. In contrast, you may end up in extreme happiness and pleasure. For instance, instead of the horrible cell, you may fall into another part of this world that is just joy in its utter meaning, which is so much that you, in your dream, tell your conscious part that you don’t want to wake up to reality, but it is too late; as soon as you think about the reality—the world which your actual body exists in it and is breathing in an out constantly—you wake up to it instantly.

   Let’s look at history together to find out what our ancestors thought about dreams and compare it with today’s science. Back in Ancient Greece, Plato, the great philosopher, argued that dreams were the way in which the gods conveyed their messages to humankind. He believed this was a communication channel between us and them and that without dreaming, this channel would be disconnected. He also had second thoughts simultaneously, considering that some disturbances in the human body’s internal motions could be the cause for seeing dreams.

   Dreams have been essential for religions. For instance, according to the religious texts (the Bible and Quran), Abraham saw in his dreams that he had slaughtered his son, Ishmael, for God; hence, when he woke up and told the story to his wife and son, they said this was a god’s command that must have been obeyed and executed as “a prophet’s dream is no dream but reality”.

   According to the Islamic history books, Muhammed, the prophet of Islam, also had a dream that, after his death, his followers realised it. Once, when in the middle of poverty and forlornness, in Makka, Muhammed had told one of his very first disciples that in his dreams he’d seen that one day the very disciple was going to wear the crown of the King of Persia, and according to the same historical sources, some years later and after the Arabic Invasion of Persia, the very disciple put the crown on his head—the same one that the Sassanid Emperors used to have it on their heads before then.

   Dreams are also vital in literature. They can be seen throughout the works of many novelists. For instance, Alice in Wonderland—by the English author Lewis Carroll—is about a girl’s dream. Alice goes down a rabbit hole to find the mysterious underground wonderland. She encounters fabulous creatures that defy all reasonable expectations. After numerous incoherent adventures involving a Hatter, a Hare, and the Queen of Hearts, she wakes up in time for tea.

   In contrast, today’s advanced science (particularly neuroscience and psychology) defines dreams as the stories and images our minds create while we sleep. Dreaming may have benefits, such as helping the brain process the information gathered during the day. Furthermore, scientists argue that dreams are a state of consciousness characterised by sensory, cognitive, and emotional occurrences during sleep. A dreamer has reduced control over their content, visual images, and memory activation.

   Saying all this, I, a new writer who loves traveling into fantasy worlds, can define dreams differently. I believe we have two lives: one in which we are alive now (according to the physical definition of life) and can move, speak, smile, think, make love, and become angry, thirsty and hungry, whereas, in the other world (the world of dreams), we can be the same, but without surrendering to the rules of physics.

   I tell you this: I can live a better life in the world of dreams because I can marry the most beautiful girl and live happily beside her or become the wealthiest man with no one around to stop me from becoming that person. I can become a king, or maybe a god. It is a fantasy world far more advanced than the conscious world, and that is why I like it more. Even time travel (such as going from point A to B faster than the speed of light) is possible in my dreams; hence, I don’t get fatigued or exhausted from traveling and exploring it. So, let’s enjoy the world of dreams tonight!