Playing with the past

An old man lives at the bottom of my garden. His name is Robert Barkus, or Bakehouse, or Bagust. Nobody is quite sure. But I often sense him around when I’m gardening, and I’ve found out a fair bit ab

If you were to look back at a list of bestsellers over the last few years, there are a number of trends to be found – and one among them is the rise of the mythical retelling. The popularity of return

The first five pages of my new novel, Small Acts of Resistance, a love story set during the First World War, have taken a somewhat circuitous route to print. Their journey into being started over twen

Did you know that Thomas Müntzer, leader of the German Peasants’ War in 1525, used a rainbow flag to rally his followers? It’s an aptly exuberant image for the radical charisma of Müntzer, and for the

In the first part of our examination of The Building Block of Dialogue, we looked at how to build a Scene of Dialogue. A Scene of Dialogue contains the elements which supplement the words spoken by th

“I am a Member of our funny little ...