Hello, welcome along to this week's writers' routine where we're chatting to Greg Hurwitz.

He's got a new book out in his Orphan X series. It's called The Last Orphan.

We talk about his plan at the start of his career to make writing into a regular job so it could last as long as possible.

Also, how he's managed to get back into a state of pure writing without any of the other distractions that normally surrounds success.

And you can hear that even though he's written, published and sold a lot of books, he still gets stuck in the baggy middle, just like everyone else.

And whenever I'm in the second act, I always feel like, you know, in a screenplay, you can kind of keep your bearings in it.

Even if you're on page 70, you can kind of reach forward and grab the lip of the third act and you can still reach back and like having

your muscle memory the first act books man that that second act books are kind of like you go down

and descend into them right and then you just write forward for months and then you pop out the

other end and look back and hope it doesn't suck i mean you're just you know it's like I can be in the story a lot, but they're big. I mean, there are 400 pages of final product, right? They're not 110 page recipe, like a screenplay with lots of white on the page. So it's a very different endeavor. And I'm always in the middle. I have a moment where I'll come down and be like, you know, it's just not working. And my wife will look at me and she goes, second act. Like, yep, it's a second act.

Really good one this week. Loads coming up with Greg Hurwitz in writer's routine.

Yes, welcome along to the show. My name is Dan Simpson. Thank you for being there for listening, for finding, for playing, for sharing. This is the show where we take a look through an author's working day to see how they get stuff done, to see how they take an idea and they plan their day, their life, their time, their space all around it to give it the best chance of getting down onto the page.

And it's a fantastic guest this week.

Greg Hurwitz is a multi-million Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author.

He's written screenplays for movies, written comic books like Batman.

He helped write the opening ceremony for the last football world cup. He's published,

I think it's about 14 standalone adult novels, two young adult books, and he's back with

the latest orphan-ex novel, The Last Orphan. Evan Smoke was taken from a group home at the age of

12 and then raised and trained in the orphan program,

which is an off the book's operation designed to create assassins.

Evan is orphan ex, the nowhere man.

Now Greg does a lot of research for his books,

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