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...
Winston Churchill: The Roaring Lion At the moment, clips from The Crown keep coming up on my Facebook page and then, once you’ve watched a few, they appear on YouTube too. Thanks, cookies! I’ve never gone in for writing twentieth century fiction, although I’m not opposed to reading it. One of the most interesting things about historical fiction, of course, is the ability to put words into the mouths of people who really lived. Over the past couple of blogs, I’ve looked at Henry VIII and Alexander the Great, and how I have used their characteristics and moulded them into what I needed for my stories. How brave, then, of the writers of The Crown to put words into the mouths of people who were still speaking! There has been a lot of speculation about how members of the royal family would have reacted to various parts of programme. In fact, thanks to the aforementioned cookies, I now get spammed with clickbait articles like, “Watch the scene which made Prince Philip want to sue make...