JULIAN GYLL-MURRAY

Periphery: Failure, Fingerprints and Falling in Love With Writing Again

October 12, 2026

How publishing short stories helped me get back into writing...

 

In terms of writing, I’ve spent the last few years in a mire.

Affected by some difficulties in my personal life, I now finally understand what people mean by ‘writer’s block’. Since the release of Blade of Rebels, I have tried my hardest to complete the last instalment of The Lost Sect series. But often I found that the words just refused to come out (or at all). The pressure to get the last book right, and to make it epic as possible, meant that nothing I wrote was good enough.

Intensely frustrated, I made the decision to work on other things: to keep my creative brain active so that it could finally come back around. This led to some great projects— some fantastic ghost-writing work, for example.  But, as is always the case with creative endeavours…many of those projects led nowhere.

One of the great Nowhere Projects took a hold in my imagination. It was a thriller in conversation with ghost stories—or perhaps a ghost story in conversation with thrillers. It was a creepy tale set around one location in my beloved South Downs.

It became an obsession; I went deep.

 I read all the ghost story anthologies I could get my hands on. I learnt enough about South Downs folklore to write a completely separate nonfiction book on the topic. I walked around the area, documenting the wildlife, making notes on the landscape. I ended up with about 100 pages of notes.

After years of prep, I finally wrote the synopsis and the opening, and sent it to my agent.  But he said that he wasn’t going to be able to sell it. My project, the project, was a no go. It wasn’t going to happen.

For years, as a relief for all my difficulties, I’d had the bliss of daydreaming about this book. It became an outlet for all my frustrations and guilt about the Lost Sect. With my agent’s response, it was all taken away from me. It felt I was failing on numerous writing fronts. I love ghostwriting, and I’m proud of the books I’ve written… but the goal had always been to write my own stories.

It’s fair to say that I had a few days where I wallowed in self-pity. But my wife, as always, knew exactly the right words to say. ‘All of that work you did… it won’t be for nothing,’ she said. ‘You’ll use it. Just… differently.’

And she was absolutely right. In creative processes, there’s no use thinking of failure and success. Sometimes it’s best to consider all writing as practice, and hope that some of it comes out in the wash.

So, since I had that disappointment, that’s what I’ve doing. Practicing.

Using my new expertise in local folklore, I contributed to a BBC radio program where I rambled about the role of the Devil in South Downs mythology. More significantly, I took some of the material I was going to use for the book and adapted it for other outlets.  

Part of the story of my thriller/ghost novel included a plot in which my main character uncovered a book of ghost stories, inspired by South Downs folklore. I decided to mine that section, repurposing all those tales for different contexts. One passage was rewritten and became part of a popular horror podcast that was downloaded around the world. And I expanded another in order to contribute to Periphery, the anthology I’m now holding in my hands. It’s a ghost story set under the shadow of Mount Caburn, one of the tallest hills in my area. It’s a profoundly Sussex story, about chalk downs and folklore and hauntings.

It might be my favourite horror story I’ve ever written.

Repackaging and reusing the stories has done wonders for my brain. It feels good to publish things again. It feels good to know that all those lost hours were leading somewhere— even if it’s not what I had at first intended. It’s good to go back to short stories, my first love.  It feels like I’m starting again… and falling in love with writing once more.
 

It has done me so much good that my brain is finally unknotting itself, enough to write the last instalment the Lost Sect. I am loving writing it at the moment; I am enjoying how epic and grand it all feels. What was once an obstacle is now a cause of excitement.

There’s been a lot of setbacks for me in the last few years. But for now, I’m back to doing what I love.

I’m going to keep writing. And whatever doesn’t work… well, I can call that practice.

Keri from Warped Perspective (a great horror critic) is responsible for putting together the Periphery Anthology. I hope you take the time to check it out and enjoy all the cool stories included. This project is all down to her.

You can buy it here:

https://warped-perspective.com/product/periphery/