When I started the current work – Dark Roads, I made a guestimate as to the length and the target date. Eighty thousand words seemed a reasonable length for a full-sized novel and because I expected to need a certain amount of research, 30th June seemed a reasonable end date. Well, it’s the tenth of […]

One of the problems that crop up when there are several distinct but connected strands to a story is making sure that everything and everyone is in synch. Currently at 95%+ into the story and I suddenly find one of my characters is where he shouldn’t actually be. The bad guys have launched a vicious […]

When I set the target lengths for a book, I usually put 80,000 words. It’s a purely arbitrary figure and has no specific significance. But it does give me a target to aim for. Likewise I usually decide on a deadline date, Scrivener, my writing program, is then quite happy to do a simple calculation […]

It seems that researching while writing is more than half the fun. Or so far, at least. Looking up archaic the usage of words, making sure that the facts are right in the context of the setting and desperately trying not to be distracted by some obscure tidbit of knowledge that suddenly drops in your […]

It’s interesting when you start to do some research for a story just how much incidental information you can pick up. For example, how far can you ride a horse in a day? Apparently a fit horse could travel anything up to one hundred miles in a day, provided that it could be rested for […]

The current work, Dark Roads, is set in the medieval period, 1201 to be precise. How people spoke then was effectively a completely different language to what is spoken now, so much so that we would not understand someone from those times, nor they us. Given that, how do we write dialogue that sounds sufficiently […]