In The Black Khan, Ausma Zehanat Khan’s latest fantasy novel, a resistance group struggles to overthrow a cruel patriarchy led by a tyrant. You know, escapist stuff. Khan’s work has been compared to George R.R. Martin’s, but it also explores issues of cultural divides and conflicts inspired by the contemporary and historical worlds. We talked to Khan about leaving a career in law to write, how she gets and gives help from fellow novelists, and how writing a book transforms the room she works in.

Are you embarking on a one-month quest to write the first draft of that novel you’ve been dreaming of? Or perhaps you just want to feed off the energy of the 400,000 people who are. Here are our top tips for aspiring novelists.

During my first year at uni, my friend started a book club. We picked Ulysses. We met up once and I've still never read Ulysses. Book clubs are hard! They're so hard that blogs list things to talk about when no one in the book club read the book. ("Read reviews of the book out loud and talk about those.") If your book club is really just an excuse to hang out, that's fine! But if you actually want to read and discuss some literature, try a short story club.

Want to spook yourself silly when you're meant to be sleeping tonight? Welcome to the world of creepypasta - first person horror stories that live on the internet and are just realistic enough to scare the crap out of you. As with all forms of horror the quality of creepypasta varies wildly, but we've collected ten of the best right here.

If you want to write for a living, you should write for free. Hell, if you already do write for a living, you should write for free. And that free writing should be some of your best work.

I watched Westworld months after it aired, and I felt lonely; no one still wanted to talk about it. Half the fun of a good work of entertainment - a TV show, a movie, a book, even a podcast or video game - is talking about it, studying it, learning more about it. Any good work of art benefits from study, and a bad work of art benefits from laughing at it with someone.

This one is for the hardcore novel writers who are doubting themselves, the ones who committed last month to writing 50,000 words in 30 days, but then... uh, something happened.

The hashtag #SeinfeldTaughtMe, trending this morning on Twitter, shows that the seminal NBC sitcom Seinfeld is a surprisingly good source of life hacks, or at least life advice and stupid human tricks. Here are some of the most useful lessons.

How's NaNoWriMo going? Do you have 20 per cent of a novel on your hard drive yet? If not, maybe you're having trouble thinking of what to write. Fortunately, there's a place on nanowrimo.org that is full of ideas ripe for the stealing.

Good morning, National Novel Writing Month participants! Did you do your 1667 words this morning? What are you writing about this year?