Joining The Writers' Hour every morning for one week early on in lockdown helped me break through the cobwebs and write the outline of the book that I've been working on for the past year, in fits and starts. I used the hour to write longhand, which always helps unlock my creativity. 

The Writer's Hour is a simple idea: every weekday morning between 8 and 9am BST, the founders of The London Writers' Salon, Parul Bavishi and Matt Trinetti, hold a Zoom meeting where writers turn up, enter into the chat box what they want to achieve in that session and then... write. For an hour. With the web cam trained upon them. Meaning that a load of other writers can see them writing too. It helps alleviate the loneliness of writing, which is particularly lonely during lockdown. At the end of the hour, Parul and Matt hang around for 5-10 minutes to chat.

Parul, a book editor who's available for consultations on manuscripts, joins me on the podcast to talk about how the publishing world works in a digital age, the questions to ask of yourself before getting started on that book idea - and what it was like to fall for Stieg Larsson's novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo before the public did, making it a massive hit.

Here are a few links from the episode that you might find useful:

https://twitter.com/paruledits

https://twitter.com/writerssalon

https://twitter.com/trinetti

https://londonwriterssalon.com/

https://writershour.com/

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On each episode of Freelance Pod, creative guests tell host Suchandrika Chakrabarti how the internet has revolutionised creativity and work.

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