Sam Mills, author of 'The Watermark' - Speculative fiction author discusses playing with genre, switching projects, and teasing burnout
Writer's Routine
Dan Simpson
4.9 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 16 January 2026
⏱️ 57 minutes
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Summary
Sam Mills is an innovative and wildly creative writer, who has always wanted to publish books. She's written non-fiction books, 'Uneven', 'The Fragments of my Father', and others, also crossover, genre-bending novels like 'Blackout', and 'The Quiddity of Will Self'. She's written for The Guardian, The Independent, the New Humanist and more, along with running 'Dodo Ink', a small indie press that publishes daring and difficult literary fiction.
Her new novel is 'The Watermark'. Inspired by 'Inception', it tells the story of Rachel and Jaime, who become trapped by Augustus Fate, a once-lauded novelist, in his latest creation. They must find their way back home through a labyrinthine network of novels, flitting from a harsh Russian Winter, to Victorian Oxford, from a utopian metropolis to an AI-dominated future.
We discuss why she likes the romance of being a writer, and that helps her deal with the instability of it. Also, you can hear how she creeps close to the line of burnout, yet knows exactly when to pull back. Sam shares pen opinions, and how she's developed the cafe-writer's sense of when to leave.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This week's episode of writers routine is sponsored by the Quick Book Reviews podcast. |
| 0:05.7 | If this show takes you behind the scenes of writing books, the Quick Book Reviews podcast |
| 0:10.7 | takes you into what makes them brilliant. It's all about the authors too. You can join |
| 0:16.3 | Philippa, who for the last six years has been chatting to some of the biggest authors around and discovering their newest work. |
| 0:23.7 | If you're a reader looking for new book recommendations and getting to know your favourite writers, |
| 0:28.7 | this is the perfect show for you with in-depth chats and spoiler-free book reviews in perfect bite-sized chunks to fit easily into your day. There's a new episode out with |
| 0:39.5 | eight brilliant thriller recommendations in there for you. Also, a look back at the biggest |
| 0:44.6 | books of last year and a look ahead to the biggest reads of 2026. Filippa gets into all the |
| 0:50.5 | fun questions too, finding out what authors like to eat, where they want to go on |
| 0:54.8 | holiday, and the gossip about bits of their life that you won't find anywhere else. |
| 1:01.3 | All that with some very speedy book reviews, getting right to the heart of all the newest |
| 1:08.6 | stuff out there and the best ones for you to read. |
| 1:12.3 | The Quick Book Reviews podcast is a lighthearted look at authors and what you might love about |
| 1:17.5 | their new book. You can get two episodes a week, wherever you get your podcasts. Just search |
| 1:23.1 | for the Quick Book Reviews podcast. |
| 1:37.8 | Hello, welcome along to a brand new episode of writer's routine. |
| 1:39.8 | This week chatting to Sam Mills. |
| 1:45.7 | Sam has a new book out and it's an idea that's unlike any that's come before. |
| 1:47.3 | It's called The Watermark. |
| 1:50.6 | It crosses genres in one novel. |
| 1:52.4 | It's a novel inside a novel. |
| 1:58.3 | We'll talk about how she got into the right frame of mind to write across different styles in the same book. I used to sometimes when I was working on the Dickensian section, you know, read Dickens and |
... |
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