Author Guest Post

Emma Bamford on reimagining Hitchcock’s Vertigo from a female protagonist’s perspective

Twenty-six years ago I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece Vertigo for the first time and…

Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé & Adiba Jaigirdar: Libraries shaped who we are and allowed us to become authors

Best friends and bestselling authors Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé and Adiba Jaigirdar have co-authored a brand-new swoonworthy enemies-to-lovers…

Joanna Nadin: Conjuring Characters From Different Decades

The first flicker of a story, for me, is always a character. Plot is character…

Two hundred years since Lord Byron’s death, is our first true celebrity still the ultimate Bridgerton beau?

Bridgerton is back, in another masterful exploration of human frailty. Regency romance has always been…

Gabby Hutchinson Crouch on her love of William Shakespeare as a fictionalised character

I love Shakespeare. I love his plays, his poetry, and I love the man himself,…

Charlotte Butterfield on creating likeable characters

One thing I get asked a lot is how to write characters that readers will…

The Queer Found Family of Now, Conjurers (And of my heart!)

Imagine, if you will, five teenagers. Most of them are queer, all of them are…

Katherine Blake on bending the rules

There are lots of ‘rules’ about writing. So. Many. Rules. One is that authors should…

Seven Rules For Staying Married When Writing With Your Husband

Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos have been married for thirteen years and writing novels together…

Anna Zoe Quirke on the importance of authentic autism representation in books

When I was growing up, there wasn’t really any accurate autism representation out there in…

Nathanael Lessore on balancing comedy with the theme of toxic masculinity

Why comedy? In my buildup to studying Creative Writing at university, I was bored at…

Alexis Hall on writing sex scenes and not putting “heat levels” into hierarchies

In almost exactly a week (at time of writing), the rerelease of my book For…