You Can Take the Writer on Holiday...JUNE 2026

I had a plan.

It was a good plan.

For one glorious month, I was going to travel through Spain, Portugal, and Morocco. I was going to eat food I couldn't pronounce properly, pronounce words I could barely say, while drinking local wine, wandering ancient streets, getting pleasantly lost, meeting up with family I haven't seen in years while slowly roasting in 36 degree heat, and, for once, not spend every waking hour thinking about fictional people trying to kill each other.

The writing could wait. My brain had other ideas. Apparently, creativity doesn't understand annual leave.

I'd deliberately left my laptop at home. It was supposed to be liberating. No word counts. No deadlines, just the occasional e-mail. No guilt about not opening Wordpress "just for half an hour."

Instead, I found myself carrying around a ten-year-old phone that seemed personally offended every time I tried to type more than a paragraph. Every note became a battle between inspiration and outdated technology.

The technology lost.

Mostly.

What surprised me wasn't that ideas kept coming. Writers expect that. What surprised me was where they came from. It wasn't one dramatic moment standing on a cliff at sunset while orchestral music swelled in the background, or it could have been the rowdy crowd of English at the bar, because there is always rowdy English at the bar wherever you go.

It was walking through streets where buildings had stood for hundreds of years. Sitting in cafés where generations of strangers had probably done exactly the same thing—drinking coffee, watching the world wander past, wondering what came next.

History has weight, and especially in Europe; you can feel it.

Every stone seems to carry the memory of everyone who walked there before you. Every doorway hints at stories you'll never know. Every city is layered with lives stacked on top of one another like drafts of a novel that was never quite finished.

As a speculative fiction writer, that's irresistible.

Fantasy and science fiction often look forward, but they're built on the past. Every invented civilisation has roots somewhere. Every empire has echoes of real ones. Every myth, every conflict, every tradition starts with someone asking, "What if?"

Travelling reminded me that the world has been asking that question for a very long time.

Spain gave me impossible cathedrals that looked like they shouldn't exist but somehow do.

Portugal offered cities where colourful facades stood shoulder to shoulder with centuries of history, refusing to choose between old and new.

Morocco felt like stepping into layers of trade, craftsmanship, colour, sound, and stories that have crossed continents for generations.

None of those places handed me a plot, but they did hand me a chest infection. Who knew smoking at cafes was still a thing? Apparently not me. Anyway, enough about the smokey haze of cigarettes.

Now where were we. Oh yeah. That's not how inspiration works.

Instead, they gave me textures. The way afternoon light changes the colour of old stone. The smell of spices drifting through narrow streets. The sound of conversations in languages I couldn't understand but somehow still felt connected to. The ritual of sitting down with good food and absolutely nowhere else to be.

Those details find their way into stories eventually. They always do.

Sometimes I worry that if I'm not writing, I'm somehow falling behind. This trip reminded me that's nonsense.

Writing isn't just what happens when your fingers hit the keyboard. Writing happens while you're wandering unfamiliar streets. While you're people-watching from a café. While you're staring at architecture that has survived wars, weather, politics, and the passage of time. While you're laughing over dinner. While you're trying to capture an entire novel idea on a phone that's old enough to remember when apps were optional.

Not every part of writing looks like writing. Sometimes the job is simply paying attention.

Eventually, I came home, and guess what? 

The laptop was exactly where I'd left it. My e-mail was full, yes, with rejections, but surprisingly with acceptances.

But my stories, however, had multiplied, and apparently, they enjoyed the holiday even more than I did.