Category: Books

  • So, was that Game of Thrones TV thing any good?

    In the final of our blogs about “Thrones” we ask the big question, was the TV series any good?  Several author friends of ours have offered their opinions… Steve McHugh (author of urban fantasy series, The Hellequin Chronicles and The Avalon Chronicles.) I quite liked it for the most part. I think it suffered from doing…

  • Who would you have on your small council?

    Of course, we’re talking about Games of Thrones here. We want to look at that all-important issue of what makes a great leader – the people who are appointed to advise the leader! We asked some of the best authors to pick a new small council for the new king of Westeros. Iain Grant (comedy…

  • Who should be king or queen of Westeros, eh?

    Of course, we’re talking about Games of Thrones here. The final series of the immensely popular HBO series caused some viewers some deep irritation and lot of Game of Thrones fans weren’t happy with which character got to rule over Westeros at the end of the television series. In the second blog in our series,…

  • How should you defend your city from dragons?

    Of course, we’re talking about Games of Thrones here. The final series of the immensely popular HBO series caused some viewers some deep irritation and we’re here to address that. In the first of a series of blogs, we take a look at that all-important issue: how should you defend your capital city from a…

  • Book Restoration: a story

    Have you ever wondered what is involved in a book restoration? I grew up with this cookery book. It holds the recipes of my childhood. I’m not so keen on liver, but you can see from the stains that we ate it a lot. The book was in a very sorry state. There was hardly a single page…

  • Creepy Dolls (and how this one demanded to have stories written about it)

    The Uncanny Valley You may have come across the concept of the “uncanny valley”. This is the strangeness that humans perceive when something is very close to resembling a human, but isn’t quite right. The reason for it being described as a valley is because our acceptance of human-like forms goes up and up as…

  • What price research?

    Heide and I are currently working on third and fourth books in the Oddjobs series. If you’ve not read them (and you can get the first one HERE) then we should explain that they’re comedy horror novels about the government employees who have to manage upcoming apocalypse and were described by a recent reviewer as…

  • The Virtual Reality Book Trailer – Simon Fairbanks gives it a test drive…

    We met up with indie author, Simon Fairbanks, at the Edge-Lit genre fiction event in Derby last weekend and we showed him our new Virtual Reality Book Trailer. He was so impressed, we asked him to do a guest blog to describe his experiences… Edge-Lit surpassed my very high expectations: charming authors, fascinating workshops, and…

  • 2017-2018 – What did we do? Where are we going?

    What did we do in 2017… We started 2017 hotly promoting our latest Clovenhoof novella, Clovenhoof and the Trump of Doom. This was a story, written in the days after Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election. We had great fun writing it and fans have taken really well to it, although some readers…

  • Disenchanted blog tour – Epiphany’s story

    Disenchanted is now available to buy, and to celebrate, we’ve had a blog tour. We’ve reproduced the story fragments used on the blog tour here for your convenience; all six make an entire short story. The blog tour stops were the ones you can see on this banner, and we’d like to thank those lovely bloggers who helped…