CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

I don’t recall ever suffering from ‘writer’s block’, in the same way that I don’t think I’ve been bored since I was about 7. There always seems to be too much to do, and certainly too much to write about. But I’ve observed plenty of this phenomenon in others and studied the matter. So here I offer some suggested remedies for the situation in which you simply hit a ‘wall’ and cannot move forward with a piece of writing. Most of these remedies can be found in some form elsewher

I’m not a big fan of horror stories or of the horror genre. My thinking is that the world is a frightening and horrible enough place without adding to it. Master authors like Dickens, with his masterpiece short story ‘The Signalman’ or Thomas Hardy and his chilling Wessex tale ‘The Withered Arm’ turn the genre into a joy to read because of their mastery of storytelling, but the horrific for its own sake? Not for me.   Having said that, though, I haven’t yet encountered a stor

There’s at least one myth that we all grow up with that becomes so intertwined with our lives that we have difficulty seeing it as a myth at all.   I’m talking about the myth of the many and the few.   We go to school, and from the first year a process called ‘teaching’ begins. This is the laying out before a class of children particular sets of data which the society, through government or local authorities or some other means, decides that children need to learn. In the beg

I just finished rewatching Serenity  again for the umpteenth time. This is the 2005 American space Western film written and directed by Joss Whedon in his feature directorial debut. It’s a continuation of Whedon's short-lived 2002 Fox television series Firefly, of which I have never seen an episode - but that doesn’t matter. Serenity  immediately returns to my (ever-shifting) list of top ten films. Set in 2517, the story follows the crew of Serenity, a "Firefly-class" spacesh

I was never a ‘party person’. The idea of appearing on stage in any kind of show or taking part in anything remotely theatrical was repellent to me. Apart from developing a reputation as a public speaker by accident (related in an earlier blog article) I have managed to avoid such events for the most part. On one occasion though, again by accident, my role-playing became real in an unexpected way.   A fancy dress party with a historical theme was to be held at a remote locati

As a new writer, when you walk into a bookshop, what do you see?   Do you see thousands of shiny successes, each carefully categorised on shelves, each its own testimony to the triumph and wealth of its author?   Do you see an overwhelming amount of books signifying a closed market, a fabled realm into which you can never reach?   Does that zone inside you that you call your heart fill like a bath with the tepid green water of envy?   Please let me help you shatter some illus

Does any written work have an audience?   In other words, does quality count?   It’s an arguable point. Even the scribblings of a young child might be valued by its mother.   What kind of audience? What size of audience? Is there any way of guaranteeing that at least some people will read a work? It may shock you to discover that 99% of books put out by traditional publishers do not make any money at all, for the author, the publisher, the distributor, anyone. Publishers and

What’s really the best guide as to how to market your work?   You.   Ask yourself the following questions:   When browsing the net to buy a book, do you ever spend a lot of time on those group pages or sites which have long lists of links from people trying to sell their books?   When you receive a post on your page or in some way planted in front of your face on social media which says something like ‘Here’s my latest book, click here and “like” it now’, do you do so?   When

I’ve wanted to be a writer from a very young age. I recall sometime in 1967, when I was 8 years old, our family was in the throes of preparing to migrate to the edge of the desert in Australia from the edge of the Peak District in Yorkshire, England. I didn’t want to go, but Decisions Had Been Made and at the age of 8 one doesn’t have a veto on such matters, so there I was in my living room watching my father go through a whole heap of stuff - literally, a heap, piled in the