Category: Blog

Because – hands up – someone who has been close to me for much of my life, probably has it. I’m not saying who, or even divulging their gender, but the way they are has caused huge problems for me. The NPD character in my books is not based on this person. She is just…

There’s a bit of an ASMR element to my early morning editing sessions. The room is quiet, apart from the ticking of a clock. I move the wooden chair on the wooden floor. It creaks, always the same sound. I click on the overhead, ancient, anglepoise lamp, by queezing the button inside the shade, on…

Please can we have an alternative text form, than normal, bold and italics? Backwards italics, maybe? A quick search tells me that they do exist, but not in most ordinary fonts of the kind that will work on Amazon’s Kindle or other eReaders. Why do I need one? Oh, it’s the voices again. I’ve got…

It’s surely the goal of every fiction writer. We want to so absorb our readers’ attention with the flow and the intrigue of the story, that they are able to take a break from their lives, rest their brains, stop worrying, release some tension. It is definitely one of the goals in writing, but it…

That is one of the questions on my mind, as I’ve been editing my three History Maps books: UI, VR and AI. I wrote the first draft of book one (UI) through 2019, finishing in August, before any of us had heard of the virus, much less contracted it. I began book two (VR) in…

…and not one I often possess. Right now, I’m feeling impatient to finish editing the books, so that I can focus on packaging and launching them. Perhaps it’s because I’ve nearly finished now. I am more than halfway through book 3: AI. Such are the demands of family life that sometimes, all I manage to…

Short answer: I don’t. Long answer: I research while I’m writing, and sometimes the research inspires the story and sometimes, the story inspires the research. It’s more often the latter, and I sit down with Zoe in a new town, wondering what she would find out there, what would interest her about the place’s complex…

Something happened in my writing style, between books two and three, and even between the first and second halves of book three. I think I had a break in writing for some reason and when I came back, the contemplative voice had taken over and started to run wild. As you’ll know if you read…

Their company motto is “Don’t be evil,” and it seems that they’re not. Without Google Maps, Google Earth and Streetview, I could not have written my book, couldn’t have even conceived the idea. These services, free at the point of use, have surely transformed our lives and societies. I remember what driving was like, before…

“Edit a chapter,” the nagging part of my brain tells me, every day, until I’ve edited one. It used to be, “Write a chapter,” and soon enough, I imagine, it will be, “Promote the book,” and then back to, “Write a chapter,” again, when I start History Maps 4, or the first one of a…