Notes from the writing desk.
Thoughts on stories, cities, writing, and the moments between chapters.
7 April 2025
Every Story Begins Before the First Chapter
Stories rarely begin where readers think they do. Long before the first page, there are questions, places, and details quietly waiting to become something larger.
Continue reading →19 April 2025
A Map Doesn’t Tell You Where a City Lives
Maps are very good at telling you where things are. But a map cannot tell you where a city lives.
Continue reading →2 May 2025
The Coffee Shop Test
I have a simple test for characters. I imagine having coffee with them. Nothing happens. The question is whether I would stay.
Continue reading →15 May 2025
The Street People Stop Seeing
We stop looking at places once we believe we know them. I sometimes wonder how many stories disappear because we become familiar with them too quickly.
Continue reading →29 May 2025
The Empty Notebook
I buy notebooks with unreasonable optimism. Every new one seems to believe I have become organised, disciplined, and possibly even someone who writes dates at the top of pages.
Continue reading →12 June 2025
Photographs Remember Differently
A photograph captures a fraction of a second and keeps it with remarkable discipline. We are the unreliable ones.
Continue reading →27 June 2025
Walking Without a Destination
Knowing where you are going changes the way you look at a city. When there is a destination, everything between here and there becomes distance.
Continue reading →11 July 2025
Rain Changes Everything
Rain is one of the oldest tricks in storytelling. But the rain itself has never interested me as much as what happens immediately after it begins.
Continue reading →26 July 2025
The Sound of an Empty Station
Stations are built around movement. Perhaps that is why an empty one feels so strange.
Continue reading →14 August 2025
The People Who Sit Facing the Door
The smallest habits are often the ones we defend least carefully. Watch someone enter an unfamiliar room and they have already told you something.
Continue reading →2 September 2025
Cities Have Their Own Memory
Cities remember through repetition. The past rarely leaves cleanly. It changes address.
Continue reading →21 September 2025
Why I Don’t Trust Perfect Characters
Our contradictions are rarely separate from our strengths. Confidence and arrogance may live in the same room.
Continue reading →9 October 2025
The Difference Between Mystery and Confusion
Mystery makes us lean closer. Confusion makes us look back three pages and wonder whether we missed a paragraph.
Continue reading →28 October 2025
Every City Needs a Different Silence
Silence does not remove information. It changes where we look for it.
Continue reading →16 November 2025
Characters Rarely Arrive Alone
Characters feel more complete when the world does not appear to have started with them.
Continue reading →4 December 2025
The Problem with Knowing the Ending
An ending imagined before the journey knows nothing about what happened on the way. Why should it have the final vote?
Continue reading →23 December 2025
A Quiet Room at the End of the Year
Answers tend to close notebooks. Questions fill them.
Continue reading →12 January 2026
When an Idea Becomes Work
A notebook is patient with possibility. A page is not.
Continue reading →29 January 2026
The Long Hours Nobody Sees
The reader sees the sentence that remained. They do not see the twelve versions beneath it.
Continue reading →17 February 2026
Writing a City You Cannot Visit Every Morning
A city does not become real because I can name every building. It becomes real when the people inside the story have learned how to move through it.
Continue reading →8 March 2026
The Problem with Characters Who Refuse to Leave
Curiosity is expensive. One question becomes a page of notes. The page becomes a history. The history creates another person.
Continue reading →27 March 2026
Why I Stopped Counting Pages
The problem is that pages have no idea whether they are good. They are remarkably supportive in this way.
Continue reading →15 April 2026
The Night the Ending Changed
It was a perfectly respectable ending. It belonged to the story I thought I was writing. That story no longer existed.
Continue reading →3 May 2026
Research Is a Dangerous Word
At some point, preparation becomes a very sophisticated form of hiding.
Continue reading →22 May 2026
The Distance Between Book One and Book Five
The first book did not know what the fifth book knew. Good. Beginnings should be allowed some innocence.
Continue reading →10 June 2026
Five Books and One Very Patient Coffee Machine
The coffee machine asked nothing. It simply made coffee. This is an underrated quality in a creative partner.
Continue reading →28 June 2026
Why Writers Need to Leave the Desk
This is not leaving the desk. This is carrying the desk through the city.
Continue reading →11 July 2026
The Last Glass of the Evening
There is a point in the evening when coffee becomes dishonest.
Continue reading →15 July 2026
THE VAEN JOURNAL
ISSUE 01 — SUMMER 2026
Stories • Cities • Memory
A visual journal exploring the world behind The Prague Story — its cities, notebooks, photographs and the ideas that became a story.
26 July 2026
Not Every Door Needs to Be Knocked On
There is a strange pressure to believe that every opportunity must be pursued.
Continue reading →