Just 8 words
News, events, resources and opportunities
LAST CHANCE: Advanced Picture Book Course with Clare Helen Welsh. Starts Tuesday 17th February 2026 from 6-8pm and on Tuesdays until 31st March 2026. Featuring agent Lorna Hemingway who will do a Q&A and give feedback on your work.
WriteMentor Picture Book and Novel Awards, in partnership with Darley Anderson Agency: Submissions are open now until 11:59pm on Tuesday 31st March 2026. We accept entries from all genres of fiction from PB up to Adult.
Spark Mentoring: whether you want to work with one of our experienced mentors on a monthly or one-off basis, we provide an affordable and flexible set of options to help you get the help you need to elevate your manuscript.
The Times/Chicken House Children’s Fiction Competition (full-length novel for readers aged 7-18) and The Broken Binding Prize (YA sci-fi, fantasy, and speculative fiction) - Both prizes open for entries on 9th January and the deadline for submissions is 1st June 2026.
Traditional Publishing Pathways Event
With Bonnier Books
Saturday 14th March
Our Traditional Publishing Pathways event is a one-day, 2 talk event featuring industry insiders from Bonnier Books, focussing on behind the scenes of publishing a Picture Book and a Novel.
10am: Publishing a Picture Book (with Amelia Warren, Lorraine Monagle)
1pm: Publishing a Novel (with Ella Whiddett and Amber Ivatt)
You can buy your ticket here. Discount for Hub members (ensure you are logged in when purchasing).
Hub Calendar (all times GMT/BST)
February
Agent Q&A Tuesday 17th 7pm with Emily Talbot
Writing Short Stories Workshop Thursday 19th 3pm with Florianne Humphrey
PB Chat Thursday 19th 7pm with Clare Helen Welsh
PitchHero Friday 20th - pitch on Thursday 19th - with Emily Talbot
Rhyme Time Chat Monday 23rd 11.30am with Arden Jones
Ask the Editor Monday 23rd 8pm with Ashley Thorpe
Meet the Author Wednesday 25th 7pm with EL Norry
March
Monthly catch-up Monday 2nd 8pm with Melissa
YA Chat Tuesday 3rd 7pm with Melinda Salisbury
Meet the Author Tuesday 10th 8pm with Matt Ralphs
MG Chat Thursday 12th 7.30pm with Vashti Hardy
PB Chat Thursday 19th 7pm with Clare Helen Welsh
Agent Q&A Monday 23rd at 7pm with Callen Martin (Madeleine Milburn)
Pitch Hero Friday 27th - pitches on Thursday 26th - with Callen Martin
All sessions are recorded and available to watch back, so don’t fret about being there ‘live’. This is just a few of the many sessions/opportunities that happen every month in the Hub and are all available on catch-up if you join now.
What is the Hub?
The WriteMentor Hub is a group chat you actually want to be in. Writing club meets social hangout, here we cheer each other on, share knowledge and advice, level up our skills, and have fun doing it.
Everyone’s invited and our doors are open all year round. From absolute beginners to multi-published authors, we all have something to share and something to learn. No gatekeeping, no cliques, no secret handshakes. Just a welcoming crew of writers who understand that success is not about perfection, pressure, or pretension. It’s about connection, collaboration, and community.
More than just a space to chat, the Hub is a creative playground of inspiration: live talks and workshops, structured courses, and an ever-growing library of resources to help you hone your craft. Join critique groups for honest, constructive feedback, take part in interactive writing sprints to boost motivation, or pitch your work to agents in our monthly contests.
Whether you’re looking for advice, accountability, or a creative spark, join the Hub today.
The Final Word
Just 8 words
Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.
When we make an easy choice today - we skip the gym to sit on the couch, we have the takeaway instead of sticking to our diet plan, we skip writing for the day to binge on Netflix - we make our lives harder the next day.
Of course, making the easy choice sometimes is okay. We can’t always make everything in life hard, every day. But the more we make the easy choice, the harder we make our life tomorrow. And of course, it compounds, much like our word count when we write a little every day. But when we don’t compound, and we make easy choices day after day (like I’ve been so guilty of at many times in my life), we wake up one day, months later and we realise we’ve made no progress and that deadline is imminent, or more poignantly, that our life is passing us by.
When we make the hard choice today - when we put bum to seat, when we do the hard edit, we cut the lovable side character, we take out our favourite purple prose, or we just think of our story and move around the words in our head - we make our lives easier tomorrow, and even easier the day after. And the more often we make that hard choice, we make our lives easier and easier in the long run.
We look back in 6 months time and we see incredible progress and our confidence, competence and completion all sky rocket. We finish projects, we improve our craft, we feel like writers because we do instead of hoping or dreaming.
I am very severe and hard with myself at times. But I am also guilty of making my life easier in the moment to the detriment of my future self.
We should always try to act in the best interests of future us - and of course, sometimes that means doing something that seems like the easy choice, like resting to ease our chronic illness symptoms for the next day, when it’s actually the hard choice. We want to write, but skipping it acts in service of our future self.
There is no one right way to live your life, and each of us must assess what we consider to be the easy and hard choices each day. And of course, there is the right choice. Which is sometimes counter to what others would perceive as easy or hard.
Writing is the god-tier of delayed gratification and we have to make even more hard choices in our every day than most people do with other things.
We sometimes believe that writing is about talent and craft (and of course those matter) but I’m realising more and more that it’s actually about the discipline of consistently make hard choices each day and those who are better at this, are the ones I see ‘making it’ (which doesn’t just mean publication and sales, but that they write productively and continuously, making progress on all fronts) as writers and the ones who I suspect will look back in 10 years from now at an incredible body of work, where there life will be significantly easier than the sliding doors version of themselves, who looks back with only a feeling of time passing and minimal progress.
Make your choice each day.
Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.
Writing can be lonely, but it doesn’t need to be
May the Force be with you!
Stuart, Florianne and Melissa