Writing Challenge Day 27: What's your favourite trope?

Strictly, a literary trope is a rhetorical or figurative device, via word, phrase or an image, for artistic effect. Today, it’s also come to be used for describing commonly recurring literary and rhetorical devices and motifs in creative works.

Right, now we’ve got the formal stuff out of the way, let’s look at how it […]

Writing Challenge Days 25 & 26: Favourite books as adult and as a kid

I really dislike this one. Well, perhaps not the second one about childhood books as I’m no longer a kid and can give you a definite answer.

Beloved children’s books Heidi by Joanna Spyri The Children of the New Forest by Captain Marryat What Katy Did by Susan Coolidge The Eagle of the Ninth by […]

Writing Challenge Day 24: What to write next?

Ah, well, that’s a bit in the air…

I’m now 20,000 words into my new Roma Nova novel, so I have a good 60,000 words and a mountain-high pile of research. That will see the year out, I think.

Depending on what happens next in the book world, next I might take up writing […]

Writing Challenge Day 23: What did you write last?

This blog post 😉

Okay, that’s a cop-out answer. If this means ‘real’ writing, it would be a (long) short story. But before I reveal more about that, let me digress.

Writers write a variety of stuff, not only their published stories. in the past few weeks, I’ve written a slew of blogposts for this […]

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 […]