Stephen Walker – Opinionated Ad Man, Writer and Author

  • The conversation that’ll save your relationship

    or burn it to the ground, both outcomes beat slow death. So you’ve got words stuck in your throat like broken glass. The conversation you’re not having. The one that makes your stomach do that thing. You know the thing… where it feels like you swallowed a nest of angry wasps and they’re all trying…

  • The Good Vibes Document

    I said I was going to put together an ever growing document of things I enjoy looking at. From literature, quotes, art and everything in between. A little doc to scroll through instead of getting stuck in the scroll hole that is social media. I’ve always been told to share and create things that I…

  • Building an antidote to internet poison.

    The internet feels like a dumpster fire that someone keeps pouring gasoline on. Every platform is optimised for outrage. Every algorithm rewards anger. Every comment section turns into a battlefield where nuance goes to die. Your feed is probably 90% people screaming about things that make your cortisol levels spike before you’ve even finished your…

  • Delete social media for a few days. Read this instead.

    Look around. You don’t need me to read the headlines to you. Hell, you’ve seen the videos. Violence. Death. Anarchy. All normal now, which is wild. When everything has gone to shit. I sometimes think to myself if books are really still worth reading or writing. They are. I mean we get stuck doomscrolling, thumb…

  • A manifesto for a burning world

    The world’s on fire. Again. Still. Forever, it seems like, and you’re sitting there scrolling through the ninth circle of social media hell wondering if maybe, just maybe, you should delete everything and go live in a cave somewhere. I get it. Christ, do I get it. I spent most of the day offline and…

  • The gospel according to cringe.

    Alright, gather ’round. Alex Becker dropped a banger of a post on FB today. A little bit of truth that most people will scroll by while they’re sitting on the toilet pretending their 9 to5 isn’t slowly murdering their soul. He showed the world his cringe origin story. His $200 a month bedroom, talking to…

  • For the Boys

    [A love letter to myself] Listen up, brother. We need to talk. You and me. Man to man. Human to human. Whatever the fuck to whatever the fuck. Society’s been playing three card Monte with our emotions for decades, and guess what? The house always wins. Always. Has. Always. Will. You know the script… “Be…

  • Why smart people use dumb words

    I remember writing, as if the only thing I needed to do was impress my professor… I used words that required a dictionary and a philosophy degree. Paragraphs that said in fifty words what could be said in five. I thought complexity meant intelligence. I was wrong. Funny thing though is, we get taught to…

  • Life is too short

    About an hour ago I ventured out in to the wild to grab a coffee from my favourite little cafe down the road. There’s football on, so generally this little town is dead while everyone’s packed together at the stadium about 20 mins away. On my way home from grabbing the caffeinated goodness, I thought…

  • Steinbeck’s got the sauce.

    Of Mice and Men and Grapes of Wrath are arguably John Steinbeck’s greatest contribution to the world of writing. And there was a quote he left behind when people asked him about being a great writer or on becoming a great writer. I always re-read it when I’m feeling as if my brain just decides…

  • silksong taught me the dark art of FOMO

    This was gonna be a day to nerd out hard. 7 years of waiting. Silksong was supposed to launch… Us gamer nerds have been waiting for 7 years. Keeping an eye on the devs and seeing if they dropped any clues. I fell for it completely. Woke up early, cranked out 5,000 words before most…

  • It starts with one

    That’s right. One decision. The decision that moves the needle forward in whatever it is you’re pursuing. I was asked last year what it mean to me, when it came to being an artist. Now that can be a complex answer in itself. Except for me now, it’s about being able to do the type…

  • Have a day

    So today I was up a lot earlier than usual. Today was going to be the day where I was going to be super productive. Except, I spent it reading old comics. Scrolling for spicy memes to add to my ever growing collecting, while bullying bullies on Twitter. Now I’m writing this silly little email…

  • The brain in a vat

    “I shall suppose … that some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me. I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment.”…

  • You’re not AI don’t worry

    So a couple of my writer buds on Twitter posed a bit of question to the group over the last week. The essence of the question that came up was: “How do you keep writing when people think you’re 100% using AI now?” So I went to one of those all in one AI detector…

  • How to bribe your brain in to submission…

    Picture this… You sit down to write your novel. You crack your knuckles, open that blank document, and then your brain immediately starts its greatest hits collection of self doubt. “This is going to take three months. Maybe six. Maybe a year. Then you need to find an agent. Good luck with that. I heard…

  • Cake day

    ‘Tis my Birthday. I’ve survived another year. As I’ve gotten older I just have a grateful appreciation to still be here on this earth. Today has been a day of laziness. I waited for a few books to arrive. A nice meal to be had. And a little later I’ll be watching The Thursday Murder…

  • What fallout’s vault-tec taught me about the darkest copywriting truth

    Been binge watching the Fallout series and there’s this scene that made me pause mid bite of my sandwich. I mean it was a damn good sandwich and I rarely stop when I get going… Ella Purnell’s character Lucy. This impossibly optimistic vault dweller… …emerges from her underground paradise into the wasteland above. She’s been…

  • Breaking my macbook made me write better

    Sometimes the best productivity hacks come from pure accident and desperation. Just over 12 months ago, I did something spectacularly stupid. Closed my MacBook lid down on the charger cable. You know that satisfying click when the laptop shuts? Yeah, that turned into an expensive crunch as the screen cracked like a spider web. Fuck.…

  • It felt like the hunger games today

    Something was definitely in the water this morning. I wake up, grab my coffee, make the classic mistake of checking Facebook while my brain’s still soft and undefended. Big fucking error. It’s like I stepped into some alternate dimension where everyone decided today was the day to settle scores and flex their intellectual superiority. People…

  • Audiotape – Process Prolific

    As promised. I’ve always said I’m going to do some more quick audio snippets. So here’s the next short little ramble. It’s more about my process and how you can use it too if you’re interested. Go here if you wanna listen https://stphnwlkr.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/prolificnessness.mp3 If not. The regularly scheduled emails will continue tomorrow. I’m heading out…

  • Her stubborn Southern soul

    John Kennedy Toole put a bullet in his brain in 1969. Thought his manuscript was garbage. Thought the world didn’t want to hear about Ignatius J. Reilly… This sweating, farting, medieval philosophy obsessed manchild who rails against modern society from his masturbation stained bedsheets in New Orleans. (The rejection letters piled up) His mother, god…

  • Rock bottom is just the foundation for your comeback story

    I came across this quote and if you let it. It might slap you across the face and give you a different way of looking at things… “What a beautiful gift it is to hit rock bottom. To be stripped of any and all pride, ego and false responsibility. To be left with nothing but…

  • Headlines matter more than everything else (including audio)

    This is basically about how I accidentally proved headlines matter more than everything else. Which strangely also includes audio. So yesterday I screwed up so spectacularly that I accidentally proved the most important copywriting principle of all time. So I’m out walking, feeling inspired, decide to record a YouTube short. (Which is the new thing…

  • Five f’s that’ll save your sanity and your content game

    It’s rare that I get tonnes of questions but someone asked me today how I show up every single day without caring what people think about my content. Now it’s not like it’s some kind of superpower. It’s definitely not like I’ve transcended human emotion and achieved enlightenment through the mystical art of not giving…

  • You are me and I am you

    You are a detective. Your mission is to document and observe the world around you. As if you’ve never seen it before. Take notes. Collect things you find on your travels. Document findings. Notice patterns. Copy. Trace. Make rubbings… Focus on one thing at a time. Record what you’re drawn to. Don’t stop there though.…

  • James Gunn did it.

    That beautiful, demented puppet master actually fucking did it. The new Superman movie? Its felt like a religious experience. I mean it was basically Metropolis or whatever you want to call it getting turned into abstract art. Side note: Why is movie popcorn twelve dollars? Did they harvest it from the moon? Are the kernels…

  • Well, Shit. The Silly Goose Society Flies Again

    Pssst… Hey you. Yeah, you. Sitting there with your coffee or your bourbon or your coffee with bourbon (no judgment, we’ve all been there) Let me tell you a story about how I became the world’s most expensive idiot for approximately 72 hours. So there I was, feeling all high and mighty about my digital…

  • $500 mistake

    One thing I’ve become addicted to over the years is collecting domain names. Not to flip them. Just to collect them for potential projects in the future. Unfortunately today has been a very expensive lesson in not setting auto-renew on for a domain you’ve had for ages. That lesson cost me 500 freedom doll hairs…

  • The best bearded dude I know.

    This isn’t going to be a massively long email. I’m just giving a shoutout to the man whose book dragged me out of the darkest place I’ve ever gone to. I made it out and hey, life is not too bad. He’s started getting into YouTube and so if you can do me a massive…