In 1963, when addressing guests at Frankfurt’s St Paul’s Church, President John F Kennedy said, ‘For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life.’ JFK’s quote came to mind when a magazine editor emailed to say they were dropping

We’ve all been there – you’re browsing the science-fiction and fantasy shelves at your local high street, or perhaps checking out some second-hand books a little more off the beaten track. You pick up a book, you like the sound of the title, the look

Mary Read first entered my life when I was kneeling on the floor, doing a Horrible Histories jigsaw puzzle with my young son. There was a passing reference to two female pirates, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, and this piqued my curiosity enough that I Go

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24131/24131-h/24131-h.htm This month’s story, ‘Xingu’ by Edith Wharton is about ladies who lunch. It’s a light and amusing story, but with some ‘heavy’ language. I had to look up several words in the dictionary. On th

The missing woman has been a hallmark of the psychological suspense genre since Gillian Flynn typed ‘The End’ on the final draft of Gone Girl. In the ensuing 12 years, some of the biggest books in the genre have used the trope in innovating and twist

There’s been so much media about serial killers in the last twenty years that you’d be forgiven for thinking you pass one on the street every time you go outside. From Mindhunter to the meteoric rise of true crime podcasts, from Happy Valley to Hanni

Creative non-fiction takes real life experience and crafts it into stories using all the techniques of fiction, whilst remaining true to the facts. One of the skills of fiction is characterisation, and when you are writing memoir, it helps to think o

A strange thing happened last week. I was lost for words. Happily, it didn’t last long. The reason I was dumbfounded was that I came across a publisher who found a new way of being a chiselling shithead. Now, to be fair to traditional publishers who

Win prizes for short stories up to 3,000 words. The Fiction Factory Short Story Competition is inviting short fiction in any genre apart from children’s and YA. Enter original, unpublished short stories up to 3,000 words. The prizes are TBA. The entr

Poetry is all about communication. It’s the vehicle through which we communicate our thoughts and ideas, our delights and pains, to people we will probably never meet. In a good poem, the material in our mind is translated into a pattern of words tha

House history is a fascinating research topic regardless of whether you’re exploring the history of your own home, your ancestors’ homes or a property that you want to include in your fiction or nonfiction piece. Although this subject area poses some