It’s been quite a while since I last posted here, but I think that this interview with the delightful author LL Lewin (real name Linda Peters) will make up for that! Linda’s stories lean heavily on astrology and mysticism as a thread running through her Neptune’s Window series of YA…
I have been working with debut author Lauren Robinson since November 2019, helping her bring her story of a young boy sent to an elite school in Nazi Germany to life. In the process, I have designed three versions of the cover for her (Kindle, paperback and hardback), carried out…
I was prompted by a competition to write this short story. It didn’t win anything – in retrospect, it’s probably not story competition material, and I’m no expert in writing short fiction – but it means a lot to me for two reasons. Firstly, it was one of the few…
I’m delighted to welcome Roz Morris to the blog again, this time in a video interview about her new book Not Quite Lost, Travels Without A Sense of Direction which is published Monday, 2nd October 2017. Roz is one of the most popular guests I’ve ever invited here, and I…
With a number of life challenges demanding my time over recent months, I have singularly failed to make sufficient progress on the first draft of Wargaming Campaigns, the book I have been promising to Pen & Sword for the last… ooh… four years! (A repeat performance, indeed, of my first…
Jessica Bell is an award-winning author and writing and publishing coach. Having admired her incredibly diverse achievements from afar, I was delighted to finally meet Jessica at London Book Fair earlier this year. In addition to her novels and poetry collections, and her bestselling Writing in a Nutshell series, Jessica Bell has…
Jane Dixon-Smith, known as JD Smith in the writing world, inhabits a space that almost exactly mirrors my own. By day, she’s a highly successful graphic designer, specialising in book jacket design. But in her spare time, JD Smith puts her fingers on the keyboard and taps out splendid novels.…
Many thanks to fellow south coast author Clare Flynn for agreeing to participate in my Author Insights series. I first met Clare online via the Alliance of Independent Authors (see link top right above) and subsequently discovered she now lives not far away in lovely Eastbourne, a place I know…
I’m delighted to welcome Pippa DaCosta to my online home. I first met Pippa at the London Book Fair earlier this year, where I was struck by her huge energy, enthusiasm, intelligence and good humour—she may not be very tall, but she is a towering talent, as her USA Today successes…
The next willing victim of the series is crime writer Keith Dixon. Keith has worked as a proofreader, a copywriter, an editor and a creator of online content for training organizations. For a while he worked as an organizational psychologist, running training courses for a variety of well-known companies. A Yorkshireman by birth, Keith Dixon then lived in…