The Great Devourer, as she’s known by all, prowls towards me, leaving no tracks and casting no shadow. She stops in front of me and says, I am here for you, Nenuphar. Apep has given me until the end of the Seventh Hour to cross the sands. I can’t absorb all her words. But …
While I love doing research online for historical authenticity — let’s face it, I could get lost for hours — there’s nothing to beat actually visiting a historic site to give a writer all the fine nuances of life on a grand estate. To that end, hubby and I spend some time at the locally-famous …
Where did criminals, blackmailers, jilted or illicit lovers post their coded messages in Victorian England? Why, in the Agony Column, aka Personal Ads, of the venerable The Times newspaper. Without any censorship or disclosure of the identity of the ad-placer, and widely read by everyone, including the Queen, the column was ripe for intrigue from …
Have you ever battled a dragon? Or a demon? Or performed a ritual to place a hex on someone? (If you say ‘yes’ to the last one, I don’t want to know.) One of the oft-spouted maxims of writing novels is ‘Write what you know’. For science fiction and fantasy writers, that’s often impossible, because …
The idea for this blog post arose from a very dreary, blustery day last week, full of rain and chill – the kind of day where the best thing to do is make a steaming cup of tea and curl up with a good mystery, whether in book form or its filmed version. I think …
When I was little and feeling unwell, my mother would make me a bowl of porridge sprinkled with brown sugar and cinnamon. To this day, I make it for myself when I’m under the weather – healthy, comforting and evocative of a time when I didn’t have to worry about myself, when my parents would …
Sci-fi and fantasy writers get to use our imaginations and inflict strange scenarios on the inhabitants of the worlds we create. After all, what’s an interesting story without some chaos or conflict? We might imagine distant planets that are constantly storm-tossed, or vast deserts strewn with enormous skeletons of unidentified beasts (like Tatooine in the …
The British monarchy just can’t seem to stay out of the news lately, between tell-all books, rumours about Prince William’s sexual preferences and elaborate ‘cabinet’ shuffling. For 70 years, Queen Elizabeth II epitomized the power and subtle glamour of an institution that’s been around for about 1200 years. The entire system was founded on the …
Eating good food is, for me, one of the joys in life. I especially love to explore the cuisine of the different places my hubby and I travel to. We’ve doing this for many years, and it’s really come in handy since I started writing novels. I can provide ambience just by describing what a …
The years since the turnover to our current millennium have been filled with globally historic events. There have been other world-shaking events in the past, but with instantaneous news transmission, we now get to watch them play out as they transpire. It’s a sign of the charisma of the British monarchy that millions of people …
