Urban fantasy has long held a special place in the hearts and minds of readers, skillfully blending the fantastical with the familiar to craft immersive worlds where magic, mythical creatures, and supernatural beings coexist seamlessly with our modern reality. Familiarizing ourselves with the common tropes and clichés that often appear in these stories can enable…
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…
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…
Most of the work in being a writer does not come from the writing itself. It comes from actually getting started in the first place. The act of writing itself is usually pretty painless once you get going. Sure, there are days when it feels like writing is the hardest thing in the world and…
To grow as a writer you have to take risks. Calculated risks preferably, but risks none the less. And to take those risks, you can’t fear failure. Arguably, one of the most valuable lessons I have learned over the years is that failure is not something to be feared, but to be embraced. Fear of…
It occurred to me that I might just be addicted to writing, and probably have been since my early teens. Writing has always been something that I feel like I have to do, however bad I was at for years. Like most writers, I sucked when I started. If I re-read now some of the…