Shortlisted for the 2015 Costa First Novel Award, The Loney has already been hailed a modern classic. This domestic horror about a boy and his religious family who visit an inhospitable strip of the Northeast coast in order to cure their mute son, has all the hallmarks of a classic Gothic horror - a crumbling old house, a pale girl glanced from a window, villainous locals up to nefarious activities. But what did our own Gothic horrors think of this month's choice? @thevoiceofruss I loved this

We had a small group this time but we certainly made the most of it, looking at the minutiae of line-editing and then putting it into practice with a little help from a massive barbarian and his rippling right arm. Check out the link to fully explore the weird, fascinating mind of Hal Duncan. We looked at ways to improve dialogue, and then everyone in the class took 1000 words of their writing and cut 250 of them. Yikes! Scary stuff, huh? But I recommend this exercise as a way to prove to

Another brilliant workshop on Saturday. Thanks to everyone who came along. If you missed it, we spent a lot of time looking at the common pitfalls of first drafts and how to combat them; from unarresting openings to overly-explained endings, via that good old favourite - the saggy middle. But it was equally great listening to everyone list the things they liked about their works-in-progress. It's all too easy to forget why you started this whole thing in the first place after months (sometimes