Tag: Books & Fiction
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I Made Inauthentic Roman Honey Cake – My Excuse is “Research”
Anyone who knows me will know I am a big dessert person. Since 2015, I have made a Christmas Pudding every year without fail. I also occasionally feel the need to make a Spotted Dick or Jam Roly Poly. After watching the Fantastic Beasts Harry Potter prequel I made my most ambitious yet – Apple […]
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Some 21st Century Character Archetypes
This first appeared in 2012. New version edited and updated. I read a lot of books and I watch a lot of films and TV series, typically in the evening to wind down from spending all day on the laptop working. I’ve identified several tropes of the modern age. I don’t know if any appear […]
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Feed a Writer AND an Artist: Buy Books New!
“Do you know how much it costs to pay an artist to design a custom cover for your book?” Was a question I recently asked of somebody in a book group. This was in response to how “cheap” self-published and indy book covers look, and that they “put readers off”. While readers are drawn to […]
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Some Dos and Don’ts for Writing a Prequel
It seems prequels, prequel-sequels and sequels to prequels that remain prequels are all the rage at the moment. This year, I’ve read Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage (the first volume in His Dark Materials follow-up, but a prequel) and last weekend watched Alien Covenant. These two works have got me thinking a lot about what […]
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Using Metafiction in your Writing
Metafiction is a form of metatheatre – it’s probably not a term you’ve come across all that often. However, it’s one of the oldest plot devices (usually used for comic effect) with roots in ancient Greek theatre. We still used it today and there was a great example of metafiction in last week’s episode of […]
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Why Regional Food Culture Matters in Your Fiction
Food, glorious, food. Who doesn’t like it? We need to eat to survive but there is so much more to food than mere sustenance. I started writing about food on this blog when researching for my Romans vs Aliens novel (preliminary title: Children of Phobetor). The article on Roman street food remains rather popular. I […]
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A Sense of Place in Your Writing: My Cornish Travels
I’ve just got back from a mini break “staycation” with my girlfriend. It was a much needed break for both of us. I’ve had a lot of work on the last few months as mentioned in previous posts and we’ve barely had time to breath until relatively recently. The one thing we were determined to […]
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Character Feature: Ezio Auditore
Back to the video game characters here. Regular readers will know I am a big Assassin’s Creed fan. Now I have finally traded in my XBox 360 and won’t be able to play again as this character, I want to tell you why Ezio is my favourite AC protagonist.
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Figurative Speech: Paradox
Paradoxes make my head hurt – at least the scientific ones do – and a couple of years ago I went to a talk at Winchester Discovery Centre on the world’s greatest paradoxes given, no less, than by Jim Al Khalili. Those are not the sorts of paradoxes I want to talk about here. I […]
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Spoof, Parody or Satire? And what’s the Difference?!
Humour can be a difficult creature to catalogue, especially when the laughter is at the expense of people, institutions or creative works that would be familiar to the intended audience. While I was writing Dead Heat which, by the way, was my very first attempt at anything that could be vaguely classed as comedy, I […]
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