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Know Your World
At a recent writing convention, I saw a panel entitled “Not Another F***ing Elf” in which four authors discussed the tropes of fantasy writing. There was an interesting moment in the discussion when it was suggested that many twentieth century fantasy writers copied the basic elements of JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth without fully understanding them. …
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Building Worlds and Making Rules
What is world building? Any act of creative writing is an act of world building. The moment we begin to tell a story, we are inviting our audience into a world that is not theirs. It may have enormous similarities to that of the audience but it is not theirs. Even when I meet…
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Pigeon Park Press to publish ‘Clovenhoof’
We are very pleased to announce we will be publishing Heide and Iain’s Satan-in-suburbia comic fantasy, Clovenhoof, in September 2012. We will be posting details and images as they become available. We will be launching their first collaborative novel at this year’s Birmingham Artfest. Heide and Iain will (hopefully) be doing some workshops and readings at the…
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Editors v Beta-Readers
SCENE: Flat 2a, four-hundred-and-something Chester Road, Sutton Coldfield. Ben Kitchen sits at the table, painting war-gaming miniatures (Seleucid soldiers from Antiochus’s Indian campaign if you must know) and trying to ignore Nerys Thomas who has come downstairs to get Ben’s opinion on her latest lingerie purchases. In walks Jeremy Clovenhoof (Satan) clutching a lulu.com package…
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Curtain Calls and the Chuck Cunningham Syndrome
Now, I’m not a big theatregoer but I have a huge and perverse love for that most British of traditions, the Christmas pantomime. To explain the essence of pantomime to anyone who has never seen one is almost impossible but, roughly speaking, it’s a retelling of a famous fairytale through drama, slapstick and song in…
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Clovenhoof v Draculas
Heide and I have been working on our collaborative novel since last autumn and we’re mere weeks away from finishing a healthy-looking draft of the entire thing. We’ve tackled the collaborative aspect of writing in our own way, simply doing what we felt was right and it’s been interesting to see how other people have…
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28 things we’ve learned since starting this novel
It’s one of the great things about writing a novel. Your imagination leads you into strange places. And those strange places, when one’s personal knowledge fails, leads to the need for research. Heide and I, throwing plot ideas back and forth, have probably set each other some of the strangest research challenges imaginable. So, as…
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Index Card Games
I’ve used index cards (or file cards or postcards) as part of my fiction planning for at least the last ten years. They serve a number of really useful functions. Firstly, I can jot down on them ideas that I’ve no idea what to do with. I could be out and about and suddenly have…
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Digging to France
In 1990, a consortium of companies from both France and the United Kingdom completed the Channel Tunnel, a 31 mile undersea rail link between the two countries. It was a major engineering feat (regarded by the American Society of Civil Engineers as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World) and despite its ultimate success…
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Gutterscum’s Performance Management Review
When Heide and I sat down some months ago to bandy ideas about for a comic novel partially set in Hell, we both latched onto the idea of Hell being run like the very worst of bureaucracies. It’s not a new idea but we liked it. We wanted it to be an awful bureaucracy not…