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I had a chat with a television production designer recently. This is the person who’s responsible for the look of a production, which includes the set design, and the dressing of those sets. She [...]

We’re about to cruise past Torghatten, a mountain on an island a kilometre or two off the Norwegian mainland, and just half an hour south of the Arctic Circle. It’s distinguished by an [...]

Here’s a lesson in restraint and suspense from that master of both, Michael Connelly: In Chapter 3 of his latest police procedural, The Late Show, which features a brand new protagonist, the [...]

We’ve been talking about conflict at a weekend workshop in what must be one of the least conflict-ridden towns in the United Kingdom. Stow-on-the-Wold is a lovely Cotswolds wool town, [...]

I’m now onto the sixteenth CJ Box novel which documents the adventures of his Wyoming game and fisheries warden, Joe Pickett. Why have I become so addicted to the series? Well, they’re well [...]

So, just occasionally, when writing has become a burden – or perhaps, at that moment when you anticipate that it will become a burden –  here’s an idea… It was inspired by immediate experience. [...]

He uses variants of the phrase “he rolled his eyes” four times in Open Season; three times in the next book in the series, Savage Run; thirteen times in his next, Trophy Hunt; once in his next, [...]

Today we crossed London from Paddington Basin in the heart of the West End to Limehouse Basin in the east. It’s a journey of nine miles, and descends through twelve locks. It took us all of seven [...]

Trish and I have just spent six weeks slowly working our way down the Thames River in our narrowboat Patience. We’re on the Grand Union Canal now, moored up in Paddington Basin in the heart of [...]

We’d come off the tidal Thames – a writhing, contained beast of a river whose coils you can feel flexing beneath the surface of the water – onto the Grand Union Canal at Brentford, in London’s [...]

Last month we dedicated our writing challenge to the creation of a creative community without borders, by sharing an international flash fiction contest, organised by the César Egido Serrano [...]

In the beginning, the prospect of the life stretched out before you is without blemish.  Anything seems possible. You could write a great book, compose a perfect poem, paint a memorable picture. [...]