Category: General Blog

With all my precious books now packed away ready to be transported to their new home – only a few hundred yards or so from their current one – my thoughts are decidedly switching to where and how they will be displayed on shelves yet to be constructed. And for some of them, in a...

Anyone who has spoken to me in the past 23 months or so will know that I have become mildly obsessed with moving house. For those who have patiently stayed the course and are still talking to me, watching my anxiety levels escalate as Actual Moving Day begins to seem the stuff of reality rather...

And so it’s the Autumn Equinox – as unbelievable as it seems to think we’ve reached the point in the year when there are equal hours of light and dark. Another way of looking at it is, of course, that it’s head down now into the tunnel of darkness that comprises winter in the northern...

There are questions that I am frequently asked at author talks and events. What is your writing routine? How many words do you write in a day? Do you plan each chapter? Do you share your writing with a group? And I am sure I am not unique – that all writers are asked these...

So summer starts to draw to a close – darker evenings, chill mornings – even if the sun is managing to catch up by mid morning. Returning from an idyllic summer in the Cretan sun where blue skies have been so entirely predictable that after a few weeks they were barely noticeable, the adjustment has...

An admission. I have not yet been awake early enough to see the sun rise. In fact, my alarm call as such, here under summer Cretan skies, is indeed the sound of the cicadas starting their day. It’s an idyllic way to wake up. It’s also idyllic to pull on the thinnest of clothes without...

Remember those days when it was possible to return home and find the doormat displaying neat oblong-shaped Basildon Bond or Queen’s Velvet blue envelopes bulging with handwritten pages of missives from friends, far and wide? Equally exciting were those tissue-thin airmail letters that allowed only so much text so the sender compressed handwriting style to...

That sounds like the title of a poem. Or a light summer read novel. In truth, it’s neither. Although I would love to use it sometime … In reality, it’s what I’ve been doing for the past two weeks – amongst other things. For although here in Crete it is now hot – the weather,...

Fiction, as we know, is made up. Populated by people who exist only in the minds and imaginations of their creators. And yet as we all acknowledge – and as authors are constantly asked – characters and their situations often have some semblance of a link or an echo of someone or something known, met,...

Creating convincing characters is obviously paramount for fiction writers. Even if a novel is peopled with fantastical creatures, they still need to be believable within the context of the world of the story. But how much do we really need or even want to know about a character before he or she steps onto the...