The only rule of writing that I feel is indisputably, universally true is ‘never write about sitting in a cafe when you’re sitting in a cafe.’ That sort of bullshit behaviour opens up an inexorable negative point in the creative fabric around you and takes whatever remaining good ideas that you might have and turns them into an unspooling eighth inch cassette tape of your favourite music blown away by the wind and then trapped in a puddle. Gone and you’ll never get it back. All other writing advice is bogus or situational or invented on the spot through a gauze fog hangover and offered to you more as sacrifice than actual knowledge. Also, fuck cafes. What do people even do in there? Wear toques, compare tattoos, listen to Minus the Bear? Could things be more pathetic? Give me an abandoned fire escape. Give me a back room filled with cigarette smoke and one kind of canned beer on ice, cash only, and a fifty dollar buy-in. | image @artyfisheel