Hello, welcome along. It's a brand new episode of writer's routine, the random routine, the bite-sized little midweek bit of inspiration to hopefully just help you sit down, help you get your fingers to your keyboard,

and just help those words come out. This week it's with Bridget Collins. She came on a couple of

years ago now to talk about her debut adult novel, The Binding. It came off the back of some

successful YA novels, and it went down phenomenally well. It was a huge bestseller. It launched a legion of

Collins fans who were then very excited when she went on to publish the betrayals last year.

It's a stunning book. I get sent a lot of books from authors, from publishers, authors I'm

about to interview that kind of thing. And, you know, I live in a small one-bedroom,

London flat. So I've not got much space. So some of them will occasionally make their way to

friends, family, charity shops, that kind of thing. The binding, though, is one of the ones that I've

kept because it looks so spectacular. And it's an amazing read as well. Now this is more or less just the routine

as promised. We start with a little tour of her writing space just to get us into it and then we

get into the day with the 1,000 word aim and then the escape to exercise as well. If you enjoy this,

you can listen to the full thing. Just flick back a couple of years

in your podcast feed and it'll be there. And you can always support us at patreon.com forward slash

writer's routine. Right now, let's get into it with Bridget Collins, author of The Binding and

the Betrayals with just her routine and a little bit about her space as well.

Just after the book was accepted and kind of as a celebration, I bought myself this Victorian desk,

which is what it's called the Dickens desk. So basically it's got a kind of sloping thing with, you know, with leather and gold tooling that you write on. And then it has two little sort of towers of drawers. So it looks quite, you know, it's kind of the closest a desk can ever come to a building, basically. It's very sort of monumental. And then hanging above that,

I have a picture of myself writing that a friend of mine, I went to stay with a friend who was

living in Galithia and kind of taking photos and, you know, kind of working on her own artistic

practice. And I wrote for a couple of days in this sort of abandoned country house in Spain, which was full of these kind of antique furniture and piles of magazines and all sorts that had been mouldering there for 50 years or so.

It was incredible and she kind of took this photo of me writing.

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