A big thank you to everyone who showed up to last night’s Aye Write! panel, “A Central Belt in the Mouth”. It was my first time doing anything like this, and to say that I was suffering from an acute onset of butterflies in my stomach would be a massive understatement, but everyone — including my two co-panellists Neil Broadfoot and James Oswald, our chair Caro Ramsay, and the audience — made me feel incredibly welcome and succeeded in putting me at my ease. The resulting discussions were really interesting, particularly with regard to our differing approaches to the writing process — turned out I was the only one flying the flag for obsessive plotting!

Suze (of Suze Reviews fame) captured this great shot of me in the middle of pontificating, doing a passable job of pretending I knew what I was talking about: