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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. [...]

One of the great mysteries, I’ve always thought, is aspirant writers who say that they find writing dialogue difficult. These are, on occasion, highly literate, highly articulate people, [...]

There are (at least) two rewards to be gleaned from writing. One, there is the sheer joy of it. At times, of course, it doesn’t feel joyful. It can feel like hell on steroids: the right word [...]

You’ve read The Da Vinci Code and you know that one of the devices that Dan Brown uses to get his many millions of readers to become compulsive page turners is cliffhangers at the end of each of [...]

Does everyone know how Green Eggs and Ham came to be written? I certainly didn’t until I stumbled across a reference to it on the internet. It appears that Dr Seuss’s publisher at Random House, [...]

I want to talk about names. Names we give our characters, names we give our houses and – our narrowboats. And what they can communicate about the meaning stitched through our stories. We’ve just [...]

A question from Henry Spencer, a reader: “I am constantly being told by my daughter that I should never use exclamation marks. She virtually derides their use, considering it unprofessional. (She [...]