‘Without Conscience’ left me assessing the psychopaths I’d met in my own life — Having grown up in a difficult household with a tyrannical, narcissistic parent, I became interested in personality disorders later in life. Why had such bad things had happened? Why were people so cruel? And I came to realise that, perhaps, I’d encountered everyday psychopaths. According to the ‘Psychopathy IS’ website…

It’s not a straight copy and paste, but it’s not far off! — Remember the article about Elon Musk’s secretary, which did so well last autumn? Someone’s plagiarised it. Not a straight copy and paste, admittedly — they reworded some sentences, but barely. The original author earned a lot of money for his work, so perhaps there’s no great loss for him there…

Without doing anything differently — Do you want the good news or the bad news? The bad news is that my Medium membership renewal fee went up by 21% this month. The good news is that our earnings will be worth more too! After I got over the shock of this sudden price rise, I…

Will payment for external views be the next big thing? — Whether non-members should see adverts to monetise their reads has been a point of discussion for a long time. Now it seems the cogs of Medium development are turning and advertising is not far away. Yesterday, I renewed my membership and received an email listing the benefits of membership. …

In the UK and probably in other countries around the world — The British pound is at its weakest in almost 40 years, meaning that anything we Brits buy from overseas has gone up. Meanwhile, the US dollar is particularly strong at the moment, making US products more expensive to foreign buyers. The end result is that my Medium membership this month…

Be careful when you’re using images of people — When a true crime writer used a photo of a mother with twins from a Creative Commons stock photography site to illustrate a story about a brutal murder, Amethyst Qu was shaken and felt compelled to write about it. She argued that you can’t use a photo of random people…

Get more eyes on your stories! — Do you feel frustrated when you have to wait days, or sometimes weeks, for Medium editors to publish (or respond to) your stories? I feel the pain too, so I’ve taken to self-publishing more of my own stories and submitting them to publications that accept self-published stories after I’ve published. …

I started writing the book when I was just 16! — I published my debut novel, Pestilence, in January 2021, 30 years after I started writing the first draft! The story behind the book is a long one, but I’ll give you the short version. When I was 15, I discovered the horror novelist, James Herbert. …

The poorest suffer the worst effects of inaction — In 2018, research by Indiana University suggested that Christians in the USA were less concerned about the environment than they once were. I wonder whether this has changed in recent years, following wildfires in California, Australia, and parts of Europe and an increase in extreme weather events around the world. …