Where did you grow up, and how did this influence your writing? I grew up in Northern Ireland, a place that has seen more than its fair share of bloody violence over the years. Yet the people have always still maintained a strong sense of humor, albeit an often dark and morbid one. My books…
As someone who has come to develop a deep interest in esotericism and what might be called “ancient wisdom”—things of a higher nature, aspects of spirituality that have been forgotten and suppressed in this so-called modern age—I found myself a while ago inevitably taking an interest in the Tarot. What Is The Tarot About? If…
One of the biggest lessons I have learned since I first started to take writing seriously about five years ago is that to do good work—to do any work at all—you need the ability to get out of your own way. Every single day of a writer’s life brings fresh doubt and uncertainty. Some days…
Before we begin, let me point out that this article is not intended to be some sort of blueprint for “How To Write A Bestselling Urban Fantasy Series”. The article merely outlines the research I did before I started writing the male urban fantasy series that I’m still hard at work on. As well as…
When most people think about success and the process of achieving things, most often they think in terms of goals. To achieve things, you have to set goals that will help you do that–targets to aim for, destinations to get to in specific time frames. The culture of self-help and business development that has been…
Write what you know has become one of those well-worn rules of writing that has been bandied about so much now, it has become almost meaningless. So has the less used, but still worn, quote about writing what you don’t know. Besides being contradictory, these two pieces of advice don’t really help a writer much…
I have a confession to make. For the last twenty odd years, I have been smoking weed every night of the week. I also confess to loving it. I don’t drink or do any other drugs (any more), so smoking weed is like my one “vice”, although I don’t think of smoking weed as a…
As a writer of dark fantasy horror, my early influences where always going to be movies. Yes, I have read thousands of books within the dark fantasy and horror genres, many of which have influenced me greatly over the years, but it would be wrong of me to discount the influence certain movies have had…
When I was a kid, I read a lot. I read classic books like Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, the Hardy Boys detective novel series and whatever else I could get my hands on. I loved reading and I loved escaping into the worlds created in those books. When I hit my teens, my reading habit…