How to index a book – or not
Apart from the obvious difference between fiction and non-fiction – one’s pretend and the other isn’t (more or less) – a non-fiction tex...
Author: admin
Birmingham RNA Writers Day
Writing can be a lonely endeavour, so it’s great that there’s ways for us to meet up. There’s local groups, or there’s associations and ...
Cousin Fred’s garden mausoleum
What I am about to write might surprise you. Or perhaps not, given that it’s written by someone who’s posed with a skull (don’t worry, it wasn...
Interview: Verity Holloway and “Beauty Secrets of the Martyrs”
I was on holiday in Kefalonia as a child when I saw my first dead body: the rather wrinkly 16th century St. Gerasimus. He wasn’t on view for tourists, onl...
You don’t need a typewriter to tell a story
It was the mid-80s: Cliff Richard was on telly, our video player was the size of a small family car, my mum had a perm. My dad’s fondness for pictures of ...
Lament for an Unavailable Spy
At some point, Poison Panic will be available on Amazon. How very exciting. Because I had a couple of minutes in which my brain demanded something to do and bec...
Review: River, or The Adventure of the Haunted Policeman
There are hundreds of crime dramas on our TVs, and each one tries to attack this old genre in a new way – set it in Oxford (Inspector Morse), set it in tw...
Review: Spectre, or, UnSpectretacular
Warning: spoiler-laden. I am a Bond fan. I have read all the Ian Fleming novels, and the short stories, and Kingsley Amis’ study The James Bond Dossier. W...
Mourning the silence
For five years, I have lived in world of muffled sounds and no silence. It turns out that I have tinnitus, and I have hearing loss in my right ear; for the past...
My first blog post
Just last week, I was giving a talk about ‘Social media for authors’ at Book to the Future – the University of Birmingham’s literature f...