I'm Running a Writing Workshop

On Tuesday 13 August at 6.30pm BST I will be hosting an online writer’s workshop. It costs £20 to book, and if you’re interested but don’t want to book right away, please do get in touch with me (you can just reply to this email, or message me directly) to ask any questions you might have. All are welcome.

What’s it about?

In my 15+ years of writing for clients and editors, I have some advice I’d like to share with writers hoping to progress their work. Perhaps you’re looking to make a jump from Substack and other self-publishing platforms into writing for other people and publications. Maybe you know you’re good, but you’re hoping to hone your writing further to get it closer to where you want it to be.

Whatever your writing goals are, this workshop is aimed at focusing your words into sharper, smarter writing, enabling you to form ideas and construct your arguments and stories convincingly and with style.

As Deputy Editor of Pellicle, I know what I want from writers. In this workshop, learn how to be a dream to work with (and then get more work because of it.)

What will it cover?

In this 2 hour online workshop, you will:

• Find great hooks for your story ideas

• Turn rough outlines into smart pitches

• Gain confidence for writing + pitching

• Get the skills you need to polish your first draft

• Become an editor's dream commission

When is it?

• Tuesday 13 August

• 6.30pm BST

• £20

Book your place

To book onto the workshop, just click here and follow the instructions to pay for your place. Please make sure to send me your email address.

Once you have booked on, I will send you an invite to the video chat link, and more information on what to expect from the workshop.

Let’s do this!

This week has been difficult to wade through, so I’ve been referring to a lot of my favourite comfort foods to get through it.

I love cream cheese, and I had this idea to eat piles of it on toast with blackberry jam. It just so happened that this week we also had way too much milk delivered. I looked up some cream cheese recipes and none of them seemed very convincing. Online recipes so often have this feeling of farce about them—just add this one ingredient and magic happens, keep stirring and you’ll create something delicious. I’ve been burned before by “perfect” sauces and “simple” brownies, but I had convinced myself to try it and when that happens, nothing can stop me.

This method of making cream cheese, if you stop before the part where you get a blender out, is actually a super quick way to turn two pints of whole milk into a small lump of mild cheddar-tasting ricotta, and if that sounds like something you’re into, then I implore you to try it. However, I wanted something spreadable, so I continued to press the curds, as small as they were, and then added them to my Ninja bullet blender, which by now has seen so many small horrors I truly believe it is now cursed.

To the salted, lemon-juiced ball of curds, I added back some of the cooled whey by the teaspoon in the blender, and kept pulsing until I was faced with a spreadable white paste. It tasted sour, like cultured yoghurt, and I actually liked the cheesiness. It was unexpected, but not unpleasant. I think it turned out much more like a labneh than a mascarpone.

It spread well on toast, and it was delicious with jam—like a cheesecake. It’s not a cost-effective recipe in any sense, but if you have milk to burn, perhaps you’d like to give it a go. I think I might add paprika if I ever do it again, and serve it with roasted carrots like all those food influencers are doing at the moment with blended up butter beans (which actually suck, do not listen to them, it is not as good as hummus and never will be.)

Recipe

• 2 pints of whole milk

• Juice of 2 lemons

• Salt

Method

1. Pour the milk into a cold pan and heat it up to medium while stirring all the time. You don’t want it catching on the bottom.

2. Once the milk is at a simmer—and not before—start adding the lemon juice a bit at a time. The milk should start to separate. It looks gross, but this is what you want.

3. Once the milk is separated into yellow curds and white blobby whey, turn off the heat and let it cool a little. Again, don’t let it catch on the bottom of the pan while it’s still hot.

4. Pour the curds and whey into a fine mesh sieve (or a colander with a clean, thin tea towel lining it, I’ll let you guess which I did) and drain all the liquids from the curds.

5. From here you can either eat the strange proto-cheese you’ve made, or blend it with some of the whey to make a spread.

6. If you make the spread, and I think you should, tell me how you ate it. On bagels? In a butty? I want to know.

Because everything is a bit mashed right now, there are no reading links today. I haven’t been reading. I’ve been sleeping, lying down, or playing a stupid colour matching game on my phone. Check back on Tuesday xox