PERFIDITAS | Alison Morton Author

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 […]

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 […]

Conflicting emotion

Conflict and emotion are two pillars of fiction writing whether in high-end literary fiction or the most melodramatic genre fiction.

A story will often start by providing the main character with a conflict, be it professional or personal. Sometimes it’s the place where the initial event is set (weather, nighttime, urban, with unlit streets), a […]

Radio star!

Last Thursday, I was delighted to be internet-based ExpatRadio‘s special guest on ‘The Scribblers’ spot. They let me witter on (in between music) for an hour. No, it was more of a conversation with Mike Madden, Wendy H Jones and Eilidh McGinness. I’ve met Wendy several times before – we both spoke a the last […]

How to write a 'damnèd, smiling villain'

Octavian (Author photo) Shakespeare’s Young Octavius

O villain, villain, smiling, damnèd villain! My tables—meet it is I set it down That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain— At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark. (Hamlet, Wm.Shakespeare)

“And some that smile have in their hearts, I fear, […]