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Plug

By Matt Hill | Published: August 24, 2011
I’ve something in a real-life book from Metazen’s sister publisher Housefire. It’s a themed anthology called Nouns of Assemblage which collects sixty-three tiny stories written around collective nouns. I went with ‘army of caterpillars’. Who knows what my mother will make of mine but it’s definitely a story about a man eating the Eiffel Tower. A [...]
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Anecdotes

By Matt Hill | Published: July 20, 2011
There was that time – you won’t remember – when this man knocked on the downstairs windows of the house. The curtains were drawn and I was in my underpants. I opened the curtains and the man was crying. He asked for my mum or dad. I got on with crying too. He asked for [...]
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PS3

By Matt Hill | Published: February 8, 2011
I have a fear of doing that’s made worse by not doing, and solved only by doing some more. And it happens with writing more than anything else I can think of. Bear with.
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Story

By Matt Hill | Published: February 2, 2011
Metazen published a weeny story I wrote. It’s called The Omelette, and it isn’t about mashed eggs.
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The man in Barcelona

By Matt Hill | Published: November 2, 2010
I was in a band once. Probably most of us were. The long and short: I did a bad thing going to uni – we were pretty good. Most of us probably thought that, too. But anyway, and whatever. I’m still top pals with the lads I played with. One of them went on and [...]
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Odds

By Matt Hill | Published: September 12, 2010
Here are the odds. It starts with thousands of us. Not ten, or a hundred, nor a creative writing class’s worth. It’s more like a legion, or several, with millions of words between us. It’s not just you at it, either. It’s me, and it’s him down the road, her in the next town — the [...]
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Dear Dan Brown

By Matt Hill | Published: September 3, 2010
I’m sorry. In the last six years, I called you a lot of naughty things. A bastard and a hack; some kind of pestilence and another sort of joke. I said you were the worst writer I’d read, oh, the worst by far. Happily, I threatened to set your point-of-sale stands on fire. And I told [...]
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You’re a writer and nobody really cares*

By Matt Hill | Published: May 18, 2010
There was no way to prove — actually prove, really prove — that that man was me. The story was familiar — I knew I had written it — but that name on the paper still was not me. It was a symbol, a name. It was alien. And then I realised that even if [...]
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Nine ways to trick yourself into writing

By Matt Hill | Published: January 21, 2010
After last week’s moan about writing anxiety, I spent the days since tricking myself back into writing. Has it worked? Well, I’ve got myself 4,000 words for the trouble. Below, I’ve listed what I think I did better. It’s not a methodology. It’s not life-coaching for writers. But it’s something. Use Microsoft Notepad, not Microsoft Word Notepad looks [...]
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Half a thought on new writing

By Matt Hill | Published: January 14, 2010
I am pregnant with a story. It’s overdue, but I can’t get myself into labour. It won’t crown. It’s kicking my belly but it doesn’t want to play. It’s a distraction; I feel it most of the time. It’ll be the third time. The first time it was diarrhea. The second was a textbook delivery — [...]
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