Writer, Storyteller, Seanchaí

Blog Posts

Pop History

Sometimes I’ll refer to (or rant about) something I call ‘pop history’. By which I mean the popular history that everyone knows and which is almost always wrong. Pop history is all over the place. It’s in schools (sorry, teachers,

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What’s Next

This is not about writing. I’m working on the X project and there’s not much to say about it at the moment. Instead I’m going to talk about some of the other things I have coming up in my author

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National Science Fiction Day

I’m a fantasy writer, mostly, but when I jump genres, science fiction is my second home. Some of my first ‘adult’ books were science fiction, courtesy of parents who liked genre fiction (though back then, fantasy and science fiction were

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Welcome to the New Year

2021 is starting, which means a new year filled with new goals and plans. I’m recording some of mine here, to keep myself honest. If I write them out and share them, then people will ask me about them and

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Lady of Ravensmere is live!

Lady of Ravensmere, the first book in my Ravensmere series, is live today on almost every platform, ebook and paperback. I’m so excited to share this with you. I love Jenevra, and I love her story. I hope you come

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Day 7 – Fenist the Bright Falcon

Still on quests. Tomorrow will be the last day of them. We’re also back in Russia. (Yay! More Baba Yaga! Three of them, in fact!) Maryushka is something of a Cinderella or a Beauty. She lives with two selfish, vain

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Day 6 – The Jeweled Sea

Today is another quest story, this one Chinese. Though the details vary, quest stories are very similar across cultures. (Joseph Campbell and all). But what I like about quest stories is the way our questors go about it. So often,

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Day 5 – Tamlane

This is another quest story, though a very different quest. It’s also a very classic story, often told as a ballad. You can still hear the ballad in the written story here, in the dialogue between Tamlane and Janet. Janet

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Day 4 – The Two Brothers

The Two Brothers is a quest story. After a completely irrelevant opening (which borrows from another story – Donkey Cabbages) having to do with golden coins that never appear in the story again, it’s about two brothers, an entire menagerie

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Day 3 – The Frog Princess

Staying with Russian stories for the moment, we have The Frog Princess. I’ve read a very similar story with a Chinese setting. The nearest European story is either “East of the Sun, West of the Moon”, but the genders are

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