Tag: Writing
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Good Feedback From Essex Authors Day 2020
In March, I hosted a discussion session at the Essex Authors Day, an event within the 2020 Essex Book Festival. I chose the title of ‘Using Familiar Landscapes to Inspire Fictional Locations’; the session was billed as follows: ‘An author-led discussion session to show and discuss how familiar features in the Essex countryside can be…
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Essex Book Festival 2020: Local Authors’ Day 7th March
I thoroughly enjoyed facilitating my discussion session at the Local Authors’ Day at Chelmsford Library, an event within the Essex Book Festival. I credit its success to the responsiveness and engagement by all of the attendees, who provided some excellent ideas for subjects and locations of novels. I offer special thanks to those who kindly…
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The Voynich Manuscript: Decoded After 100 Years
In book 1 of my The Invisible College Trilogy, the main protagonists, teenagers Emily and Peter, discover a ‘book of mysteries’, which contains, amongst other things, a transcription of a document written in an indecipherable text, accompanied by illustrations, also not understood. I based this upon the Voynich manuscript.For over a hundred years the Voynich…
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Essex Book Festival 2019: Essex Authors and You
Come along this coming Saturday 9th March to the Essex Authors and You day at Chelmsford library. From 10.00 to 16.00 local authors will be holding seminars and talks. Between 12.00 and 14.00 there are opportunities to chat informally with many of the writers on a one-to-one basis and to listen to them introduce themselves…
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The Flammarion Engraving: Inspiration for The Invisible College Trilogy Covers
The inspiration for the background of the covers of my The Invisible College Trilogy. According to Wikipedia, ‘the Flammarion engraving is a wood engraving by an unknown artist that first appeared in Camille Flammarion’s L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire (1888). The image depicts a man crawling under the edge of the sky, depicted as if it were…
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One Final (Probably) Visit to Vanuatu
In December 2018 I spent a couple of weeks in Vanuatu for what may well be my final visit. My partner works in International Development and is like to have only one more assignment there. It is a beautiful country and claims, with some justification, to have the most friendly population in the world. Of…
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Book Review: First You Write A Sentence by Joe Moran
‘First You Write a Sentence’ by Joe Moran is a mixture of advice, mostly good, and observation, which I found less interesting, probably because, as a writer, I am always looking for the former. Advice is of course just that: you can take or ignore it according to the context and circumstances. Useful advice includes:…
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A Personal List of Writing Guides
Here is a selection of the best guides to writing fiction that I have discovered to date. I will be adding my thoughts on each on this site over the coming months.