CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

There are a number of possibly important parallels between our behaviour as readers and writers and what we do as consumers of food.   Most of us these days go to the supermarket to get our weekly supplies as food shoppers. While there, though some of us might concentrate on the fresh food aisles, a great many of us will of necessity buy pre-packaged items - not necessarily highly processed stuff, but things that have been prepared for us in certain ways and which are recogni

During the fall-out from a particularly painful second divorce (second divorces being all the more excruciating because they draw an awful lot of power from the preceding trauma of the first divorce), I decided that, to try and ‘convalesce’, I would go ‘off-grid’ - I would develop a lifestyle which would enable me to side-step as completely as possible what was considered ‘normal’ by society, and take off into the wilderness in a mobile home.   This took some planning: first

The Inner Circle Writers’ Group  continues to expand at an extraordinary and unexpected rate. It began in 2008 with just me; it grew to a handful of members over the next few years, but in 2017, adventuring onto social media in the form of a Facebook group, it began to grow rapidly. Within a couple of months, membership had topped 500; soon afterward it reached 1,000. Now, nine years after its first appearance in Facebook, it is climbing more steeply than ever, past 12,000 me

Readers familiar with my book How Stories Really Work  may remember the ‘cup of tea’ analogy that is drawn in the first few pages. It was an analogy designed to describe how a work of fiction is put together, but it also applies to other things, including marketing a book (or any product). In order to explain how, and to refresh your memory, here is the analogy in full:   Making a cup of tea begins with the idea  of making a cup of tea. You might be at work, or reading a maga

A few years ago, a colleague of mine, a kind and capable man known as Neill Roskilly, hosted a conference that I attended as the headmaster of a school. Though much of the conference was interesting and useful, it was one phrase uttered by Neill which remained with me long afterwards.   Being a headmaster is a thankless task: one is swamped with responsibilities branching off in all directions, from child welfare and safety, to academic results, to staff management to financi

As a writer who has perhaps published a book and is engrossed in the mysteries of marketing, you may be able to discern seven distinct stages to the whole process - though you probably haven’t experienced all seven. I’ll try to summarise them for you here.   1. No marketing.   When you are in the throes of writing your masterpiece, you probably give little thought to its future marketing. And that’s perfectly understandable and acceptable. As you type out your next scene, you

There are few things more certain to stir up animosity in any group of writers than a discussion about ‘rules’.   As soon as someone mentions anything to do with there being rules about how to write, a series of explosions is triggered and a war commences. Two camps rapidly align themselves: in the first are those who believe that there are particular inviolable principles which apply in the world of fiction writing which, if an author hopes to be successful, he or she must m

C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, pictured above in my pencil sketch, are bound together for posterity as friends and as members of the writers’ group known as the Inklings which met in Oxford during the 1930s and 40s. This small group, meeting until late 1949 during Thursday evenings in C. S. Lewis's college rooms at Magdalen College (though also gathering from time to time in local pubs such as The Eagle and Child) was an informal literary discussion group associated with t

I occasionally get asked ‘How do you fit it all in?’ Several anthologies to edit, proofread, format and publish; 5,000 items of merchandise available for sale across the world based on my original artwork; original books to write and publish; a daily blog which has been running for over eight years now without missing a day; running a successful, expanding group on Facebook and answering queries, responding to comments and so on; plus private editing and proofreading work for