It’s that time of year again. All over the country people are making New Year’s resolutions, whether they are to lose weight, quit smoking or save money. But whilst some people use the New Year to genuinely make a positive change to their lives, many just give up within a […]

‘Original material is a topic that concerns all aspects of the arts.’ Ideas, concepts, styles and genres are so quickly taken-up, run-ragged and exhausted in the high-tech age. It’s depressing to think that whatever you’re doing, someone has probably already done it better. But such a defeatist viewpoint isn’t helpful. […]

I read an interesting article about what Amazon are up to with their publishing program and the way the wider publishing industry views it (surprise, surprise – they don’t like it much). This article points out that in today’s climate the only irreplaceable elements in the publishing process are the writer […]

I read an article recently about the Queen’s English Society having closed. (Hands up, I co-opted the clever title from that article for this blog post, and therefore the copyright remains with the author; however, as no one actually cared enough to read the source material, I should be fine.) Whoa-whoa-WHOA! Closed?  Now […]

So, for this article I thought I would try something a little different. Stop me if I am going off on a tangent. I’ve just finished a semester at University studying postmodernist literature, which, in a nutshell, is a genre of fiction that thinks outside the box, experimenting with the […]

This post is in response to an agent who recently replied to me asking what exactly is it that I want him to do for me. It’s like a surgeon asking you to tell him what you think is wrong and where the best place to start the incision would […]

I remember being back in school where MSN and MySpace were the be all and end all of social networking sites… Instant message, webcam chat and catch up on the latest news all at the same time just at the touch of your fingertips. Then in July 2006 came Twitter, […]

In typical high fantasy fiction there is an obvious lack of female protagonists compared to other genres. While there may be female characters, they are rarely ever the heroine, let alone a heroine who conquers and vanquishes Evil. Daughter of the Empire is an exception, and is intriguing enough to […]