The journal, every piece

People ask why the children in my books are so often afraid, and I always want to answer with a kite.

Why I deleted every sound from a scene I was rather proud of, and what the silence gave me back.

Not, as one reader suspected, sitting in front of a dark screen waiting for Monday.

A week spent being a bridge, a horse and a shop, and the things I noticed while I was down there.

A broken school shoe, a cobbler who will not hurry, and a small decent thing that nobody arranged.

A reader wants to know if the slow burn is craft or cowardice, and the honest answer is that it can be either.

Abandoning a book you are not enjoying is not a failure of character, and I would like to argue you out of the guilt.

There is an hour on an autumn evening when the birds stop and nothing takes their place, and I have never learned to like it.

The first person who pays you changes almost nothing about your bank balance and almost everything about what you know.

A mystery writer keeps a notebook of small oddities, and most of them never grow into anything.

The honest answer to whether stargazing is worth it when you live under a sky the colour of a streetlight.

The small true things nobody warns you about in the last few days before term starts again.

Half the recurring meetings I have sat in exist only because a decision was made once and never written down.

A wet afternoon, a paper boat and a small niece who understood something before I could name it.

Why the parts of science fiction nobody remembers are the parts holding the whole thing up.

The question I am asked more than any other is why I never let you see the creature in full, and the answer is simpler and stranger than people expect.

A morning at the corner kopitiam, and the things it told me while I waited that I did not think to ask.

I watched two people order breakfast this morning and understood, again, that the most romantic thing I know how to write is not a declaration but a habit.

Good investing, I have come to think, is mostly the ordinary human skill of waiting without fidgeting, and I learned more about it from a bowl of dough than from any chart.

Every alibi I have ever written stands or falls on a printed departure time, which is why the least glamorous object in the room is the one I trust most.

A fifteen year old wanted to know why the big thing in my books always happens in the summer, and it is a much better question than she knew.

The nights have started coming sooner, and here is a week of small things written down from the back step while the sky decided what season it was.

I sat down to teach a card game and was taught, firmly and at length, that I had been playing it wrong my whole life.

The thing standing between most people and the hobby they say they want is not time or talent, it is the unbearable prospect of being a beginner.

On a small team the most expensive word in the language is the one you say without thinking, halfway between the kettle and your desk.

A reader wants the trick for taking an ordinary, familiar room and tilting it until it frightens, so here, as plainly as I can give it, is how I do it.

A list of what a small place does in the weeks when the visitors have gone and nobody is keeping score.

We hand all the credit to passion, when the quiet engine of every love story I have ever loved is simply attention.

A sudden downpour, a shop's narrow shelter, and the small brief society of people waiting for it to stop.

Every story about building something skips the longest part of it, which is a shame, because the middle is where the thing is actually made.

At a library on Saturday a boy of about nine asked the best question I have had all year, and I have been trying to answer it properly ever since.

The most valuable thing a small team owns is what everybody knows, and it walks out of the door the day someone does.

The power went out for two hours on Tuesday, and the whole road got a sky it had forgotten it was standing under.

I read to a hall of fifteen year olds this week and came away with a notebook of things I had half forgotten.

The figure you think you need keeps stepping back as you approach it, and the cure is a line you draw yourself.

A lit window three nights running, an elaborate and awful story, and one honest question that took the whole thing apart.

Why a sensible person would choose to be frightened, from someone who arranges the fright for a living.

A reader asks, not unkindly, whether romance sets people up for disappointment, and the honest answer is not the defensive one.

A wet Sunday at a low table, and a list of the small serious business that children insist on calling playing.

The unbroken streak is sold to us as discipline, and it is quietly teaching the wrong lesson about how a habit actually survives.

A reader asks how to know when she is ready to start, and the honest answer is that readiness is the wrong thing to measure.

The stall opens before the town does, and for an hour I get to watch a morning that has not yet decided anything about anyone.

The lessons of running a small team are not learned once and filed away, but learned, forgotten under pressure, and learned again slightly cheaper each time.

Almost nothing a sixteen year old does is about the thing it appears to be about, and the jacket is never about being warm.

Everyone assumes a man who writes about money watches it closely; the watching is the enemy, and the waiting is the work.

A question tired parents ask me all the time, answered by someone who thinks bedtime is the most important deadline in publishing.

A week of tiny, unheroic adjustments, none of which required getting up at five to prove I meant it.

A shut gate, stopped birdsong, and the oldest trick in my trade felt, for once, from the wrong side of the page.

She told me to greet a river before crossing it. I have spent this week working out what she actually meant.

Everyone thinks the kiss is the point; the kiss is the release of the point, which is a much lesser thing.

A glacier let go above the Nepal and Tibet border this week. The physics of it is simple, which is the hardest part to sit with.

You do not learn the night sky one star at a time; you learn one shape well and it hands you the rest.

On kites, monsoon afternoons, and the sort of quiet that arrives only after a storm.

A book you already know the ending of is not a wasted evening. It might be the only honest way to read.

Every book I have written has one chapter that will not come, and it is always the same chapter.