I started writing my first book when I was still at school. It wasn't historical fiction, it was high fantasy, and it was the first of ten books, under the collective title The Watcher's Heir . I knew from the word go that it was going to have this number of books, although I didn't really work out exactly what would happen in each one. Twenty-five years on and the books are still not finished, although I now only have a couple more to go! Every Christmas I settle down and manage to write a chapter or two more, and every New Year it is my resolution to finish them. I suspect this will go on for a few years more. In the passage of time since then, I've written more than a dozen books. I can't quite pinpoint what it is which keeps obstructing the conclusion of these books. It could be that I am not the same person I was 25 years ago (who is?!), and so the voice which began the books is almost unrecognisable. It could be that I have now passed the age almost all of my ...
I know we’re nowhere near Halloween but, let’s be honest, every season is spooky season if you want it to be! So, I’m going to share some thoughts about one of my favourite genres to read and write: Gothic Horror. I first discovered it as a genre when I was a teenager being taught at home. Every week, Dad would take me and my sister to the local library and we would pick a book or two to read. One week, I picked an abridged version of Dracula . I loved it so much that I immediately graduated onto the full version, before moving on to The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe . There was something about these stories which completely immersed my imagination, and I think it was how setting is always an extra character in them. I read a piece a couple of weeks ago which was labelled as Gothic, but the setting wasn’t right. It didn’t jump out as one of the characters in the book which was twisting and turning as much as any of the humans (or not-quite-humans!) Whitby is rightly proud of it...