Category: 2016

  • Festive Excess. Can you recognise it?

    This is a handy guide to festive excess. If you find yourself doing the things described here over the Christmas season, you are almost certainly overdoing it. Be warned. Len Deighton’s Action Cookbook This book is for you if you want to emulate the lifestyle of a 1960’s action hero. Len Deighton is most famous for writing…

  • Guest Post – Hilary Mortz looks at Christmas Films

    Today’s post is written by Hilary Mortz, who wrote one of the stories in Festive Treats (the free Christmas anthology, have you got your copy yet?) Christmas Films I got my ultimate guilty pleasure FESTIVE TREAT today – a glossy shiny 14 Day What’s On At Xmas TV Guide. Christmas is finally here – forget…

  • How a writing workshop led to comedy editing gold

    Halloween Writing Workshop I went to a writing workshop on Halloween. It was my birthday so I decided it would be a fun way to pass the day. It was a flash fiction workshop at the University of Leicester, held in the David Wilson Library. Our hosts were Simon Dixon, the Special Collections librarian and…

  • Making a creepy doll ghost for Halloween

    It’s nearly Halloween, and you know what that means, right?* Spooky decorations are needed, that’s what. It’s definitely more fun if you can make your own, and when you have a terrifying infant in the house already, it seems a shame not to incorporate it. Baby wanted a ghost friend, so here is how I…

  • Spotted! A monster in Birmingham’s canals.

    Why we did it We wrote a book about Birmingham, a book about the unkillable gods who live there (of the tentacled and untentacled variety). Dreaming up ways to get our efforts in front of the maximum number of people is something that we like to do. There’s no escaping the fact that Amazon do…

  • Fantasycon By the Sea

    Here’s Heide’s report from Fantasycon By The Sea 2016. This year’s Fantasycon was held at the Grand Hotel in Scarborough, with some events held over the road at The Royal. Accommodation and booze was priced very keenly, so there was an expectation that rooms would be shabby at best, utterly horrible at worst, but mine was…

  • A Writer’s Career

    This Saturday, Iain will be appearing on a panel at Fantasycon By The Sea in which he will be discussing the experience of having a writing career. Here, he is interviewed alongside two of his fellow panelists (Sue Moorcroft and David Tallerman) about the idea of a writing career and what it means to them. Do…

  • Spousemeal!

    It’s spousemeal time again. What? You don’t have spousemeal? Oh, that’s probably because you’re not married. And a co-writer of comic fantasy novels. And spend more time with your co-writer than your own wife. Spousemeal (I can’t remember when it got the name but I like the way it sounds like a German compound noun,…

  • Five Years of Pigeon Park Press – What we got out of it

    Anniversaries can be hazy and imprecise and I don’t just mean in that my wife and I can’t remember when we got married (we can’t; when we had to put our wedding date down on a passport application we didn’t even get the year right). I mean that anniversaries can be imprecise because it’s hard…

  • Giveaway for Oddjobs

    If you’d like to win a paperback copy of the new comedy book, Oddjobs, then check out the giveaway at Goodreads: Goodreads Book Giveaway Oddjobs by Heide Goody Giveaway ends August 12, 2016. See the giveaway details at Goodreads. Enter Giveaway “Incomprehensible horrors from beyond are going to devour our world and someone has to make…