Well, we're so close to release day for Beneath A Darkening Sky , and I've celebrated this by becoming a member of the Horror Writers' Association ! I also had a set of author photos taken in a local graveyard, complete with an entire flock of sheep watching me as some previous visitor had left the gate open for them. So now, I'm faced with the decision of which story to share with you. We've been through a few for this blog series, and I'm left with three: Guidman Trowie (a tale set in Orkney and inspired by the unique folklore of the islands); Moonsong (a love song from a werewolf to the moon); and Eaves-Drip , which is the story I'm going to talk about in this blog. It's no coincidence that these three stories have been left. Along with Ay Atomics , they're the short and (not-always-very-)sweet ones. Eaves-Drip was written while we were on holiday in Perthshire one autumn, but it goes back to Lincolnshire, where I grew up. Lincolnshire is ful...
I honestly can’t remember what inspired me to write about Alexander the Great. I think it was probably the Horrible Histories song , but I could be wrong about that. I suddenly just wanted to know everything there was to know about him, and to put it into story form. I actually started the story before I knew much about him and his campaigns at all so, still in its first draft condition, the opening chapter of the book has some rather hilarious mistakes and inferences. By the second chapter, I had eased into the story a little more and, by the fourth chapter, the research was there to support it too. This story was unique among my historical fantasy because of the sheer quantity of research which I did for it. I devoured anything and everything I could find about Alexander the Great. There was a wonderful blog called The Second Achilles, and I spent hours poring over archived posts, reading as much as I could about different theories and stories about the great conqueror. The blog disa...