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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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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How Should A Zombie Story End?
Compiling the epilogue to Dead Heat on my train journey back from Cornwall today, it occurred to me just how few well-known zombie stories – in film particularly – finish on a high, or at least with some sort of conclusion where the zombie apocalypse ends – or perhaps my zombie education is simply lacking?…
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Dealing with Company Names When Writing Fiction
This is one that got me thinking. I wrote another 1500 words of DNF this afternoon and finally, my protagonists were able to get hold of their mobile phones. Naturally, they found all of their networks were down and I included a conversation – as we all do – discussing network coverage. I was stuck on whether…
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