Alison Morton | Alison Morton Author

The big reveal - Inceptio book jacket

SilverWood Books certainly pulled out the stops for me.

(Im)plausibility and telling whoppers

Now I’ve started telling people about my first alternate history thriller coming out in March, one person said, ‘Oh, you’re lucky, you can make up anything!‘

Er, no.

It’s about plausibility. Merriam Webster gives one definition: ‘appearing worthy of belief <the argument was both powerful and plausible>‘. Synonyms include credible, creditable, likely, believable, presumptive, […]

New year, new blog title!

What?

When I first started this blog on World Book Day not quite three years ago (4 March 2010) I had just signed my indentures as a mad newbie writer, so the title Write a Novel? I must be mad! was an appropriate one. While I will never give up learning – no human being, […]

Alternate history and the butterfly of doom

A butterfly in the Amazon jungle makes that little extra flutter of its wings and a few weeks later there’s a storm or even a hurricane in the Caribbean that wrecks cities. That’s a little crudely put, but this is the idea behind Edward Lorenz’s chaos theory. In reality, the butterfly’s flapping wing is just […]

In defence of round-robins

Oh, the sneering! Oh, the superiority! Even Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots and Leaves) is on BBC Radio4 broadcasting a series of witty ripostes to round-robins (RRs).

Now some RRs are painful: long-winded, which goes hand-in-hand with boring; poorly composed and/or typed; with scattered blurry photos; and produced with tight margins in tiny, coloured or […]