Writing Challenge Day 21: My preferred genre

Crumbs, there are some interesting topics in this topic! The problem with this one is that essentially genres segment books into one thing or another, slicing away any possibility that a book may seep into another. 😱

Unpicking this…

Historical fiction is an umbrella for biography (Julian by Gore Vidal), adventure (Rafael Sabatini’s The Sea […]

Cathy Helms: Words of wisdom about book cover design from an expert

This week’s blog guest is designer extraordinaire Cathy Helms with some really good advice about covers! Cathy lives with her husband of twenty-eight years in Troutman, North Carolina; the house belongs to their cat, they simply live there to open the cat food cans. She earned her degree in Advertising and Graphic Design in 2008, […]

Writing Challenge Day 20: Characters' favourite food (and drink!)

Hm, an interesting one…

Let’s start with drink. Carina lives on coffee; she was brought up for her first 24 years in the Eastern United States (EUS) and like many office workers in the early 2000s, she drank industrial amounts of it.

On the way to my desk next morning, I grabbed a […]

Judith Arnopp: Evoking grief in historical fiction

Today, I’m delighted to welcome Judith Arnopp to the blog who writes historical fiction novels, mostly set in the Tudor era. In the past, she has written in the voice of women like Anne Boleyn, Margaret Beaufort, Elizabeth of York and Mary Tudor and is now writing from the point of view of Henry VIII […]

Writing Challenge Day 19: Characters' pastimes

Pastimes? Hobbies? What are those? These don’t tend to feature in writers’ consciousness; either writing is done in any spare time left after work or at the weekend, or for full-time writers, spare time is when they go and research or grab a book for background reading. The result is that I had to […]