Fantasy heroes often arrive pre-packaged. Detectives with impossible instincts. Ex-soldiers with mysterious pasts. Secret heirs to ancient bloodlines. Or they’re twenty-two years old and haven’t yet discovered they’re the most important person in the kingdom, which they definitely are, because it’s that kind of book. My protagonist Stephen Harris isn’t any of those things. He’s…
Over the past five months I’ve deleted two chapters, merged two others, and rewritten a scene that then cheerfully dismantled roughly seventy per cent of my manuscript. Then, as I wasn’t totally happy, I wrote an entirely new chapter from scratch and changed the title. I also briefly considered whether falconry might be a more…
One of the reasons I love writing urban fantasy is that the real world already does half the work for you. London doesn’t need much embellishment. Spend enough time exploring it and you’ll discover Roman ruins beneath office blocks, forgotten churches tucked between skyscrapers, and streets that seem to remember lives lived centuries ago. When…
