How do you deal with writer’s block? I know that this is a very serious question for some writers but I don’t honestly suffer from it. Not to date anyway. If I feel I might be getting stuck, there are three ways I might try to get out of it: 1. Give it a break…

I am in rural Yorkshire, a few miles outside Harrogate, staying at The Granary, a delightful first floor loft conversion, where I am working flat out on The Northern Elements. This is a novel set on the other side of the Pennines in my native Blackburn and set in 1890, 1960 and 2015. That very fact…

Baby, you can drive my car… This is Simon Dell’s first foray into publishing fiction – he has already published on marketing – and it is already imaginative and assured writing. If science fiction is your bag then this is for you. It takes the topical issue of anxiety about Artificial Intelligence (and specifically driverless…

📽 If you have not seen this film, drop whatever you are doing and book tickets now. It has been nominated for ten Oscars and if it doesn’t sweep the board, call me Jemima and paint me cerise. It is quite extraordinary: classy, funny, bawdy, violent, heartbreaking – and very very strange. Deadly Rivals It…

Before I became a full time writer I taught at Lincoln Minster School for many years. Just before Christmas I went back to see a scintillating performance of a favourite play of mine. Here is my review: Rostand’s play, Cyrano de Bergerac, is a pyrotechnic affair, exploding everywhere with wit, wordplay, [s]wordplay, fencing with foils…

During the course of the year, I have, from time to time, offered up my opinions on Facebook and other social media about books, films and plays which I’ve enjoyed – or not. I find these swift thumbnails helpful in keeping my own critical faculties sharp, but I also hope they offer suggestions to friends…

  I don’t know what other writers feel when they are asked this perfectly fair and reasonable question. I tend to have a version of the blurb available in my mind when I try to reply, a bit about how the book came about, and whether its genre is ‘tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, historical-pastoral, etc, etc.’, to abbreviate…

My collection of short stories, Cherries, is making its way into the world. Humphrey and Jack, my second novel, will be launched in the New Year. Time for some reading and a couple of reviews. Today, it is the turn of the notorious emperor, Caligula by the prolific Simon Turney.

My current work in progress is a selection of short stories to be called simply Cherries. I am busy curating these tales (as the current fashionable jargon has it – though ‘curate’ is the mot juste here) whilst my second novel, Humphrey & Jack, is with my editor. Which will appear first is anybody’s guess…