Steve Fenton

“Writing fiction twists your brain in knots.

You get to experience the life of a compulsive liar. You are constantly double-checking for consistency, acting as continuity supervisor for your own imagination.

You become a detective, picking through the diary of a suspect; checking for the slip up that undermines the story and breaks the alibi.

You wake up sweating about some detail that wrecks the timeline, or breaches the established character of the person you invented.

You craft wonderful, frightening people, who you fall in love with, but must discard.

You find brilliant twists that you can’t use because they somehow subtly compromise the story.

It drains you. You can’t sleep. You are preoccupied with minutia.

It’s brilliant.”
― S M Fenton

“One of history’s fews iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it. Over the few decades, we have invented countless time saving machines that are supposed to make like more relaxed - washing machines, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, telephones, mobile phones, computers, email. We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed and made our days more anxious and agitated.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind