I was looking through the list of legendary creatures on Wikipedia (which I recommend for any writer with any sort of supernatural connection) and I saw the entry about the Asrai. They are described as creatures of water, like an aquatic fairy, ancient and wise, and as being pale and gentle. The old fairy stories have the Fair Folk wading through rivers of blood so that seems a little unlikely, but I suppose that it’s possible.

Folklore is a funny thing. My mother was possibly the most superstitious person in the world ever and I never heard anything about the Asrai, described as being from Cheshire and Shropshire. I grew up in Cheshire, though possibly the wrong part of Cheshire and this was something completely new to me. The entry also referred to Bala Lake, or Llyn Tegid, which is as full of folklore as it is of water and includes a mysterious monster and a drowned town.

The story on Wikipedia sounded so sad. A fisherman caught an Asrai which pleaded for its life in a foreign language. The fisherman covered it with seaweed and its voice grew fainter and fainter as the creature melted away in the sunlight until there was just a puddle of water. It was such a vivid image, but I couldn’t think of anything like it in my childhood. Then I remembered Jinny Greenteeth. I suspect that the Asrai are the polite Victorian version of the stories that went around the playground.

Jinny Greenteeth was a monster, a creature that lurked in ponds and canals, lurking underneath the algae covered water. We were all warned that if we got too close to those green covered waters then Jinny Greenteeth would grab us and pull us under the water to drown. I heard a few different versions, many of them involving cousins or distant friends of the storyteller. The stories were gruesome, vivid and as good a way as any of keeping young kids away from weed-strangled water as any. When I had a quick check for Jinny Greenteeth, her geographical range covered Cheshire and Shropshire as well as Liverpool and Lancashire.

My mind has a habit of wandering away without adult supervision, and I started thinking about the Asrai and Jinny Greenteeth being the same. When you think about people in general, they come in all sorts of personalities. You can have awful, dreadful dictators and serial killers who are the same species, the same type of creature as Bob Ross or Mister Rogers. Perhaps the Jinny Greenteeth is the Asrai version of Ted Bundy or the Yorkshire Ripper. Would there be Asrai tasked to deal with the rogues? Would there be Jinny Greenteeth that realised the error of their ways and wanted to turn away from their murderous path? Would former comrades in the water suddenly become bitter enemies? Would mortals be asked to intervene in deadly battles? The possibilities for stories growing from these small folktales are wonderfully many and varied, and I’m adding them to my ‘to write’ list.

I’d love to hear what you think about this. Have you heard stories about water fairies? How would you use it in a story? Thank you for reading.

It may be forty years ago, but I still remember with clarity the first time I met my husband. It was in the early 1980s, and I wanted to figure out what this ‘roleplaying’ and Dungeons and Dragons was all about. This was a long time before it became well known and it was very much a niche. I had heard that there was a group at a local university, and I wandered along to see what it was all about.

My first impression was that it was all male. I was the only female in the room, surrounded by men in their late teens and early twenties and, looking back, they were at the stage of peak hormones and awkwardness. It could have been mortifyingly difficult, but they were lovely, and it felt like a safe place with good people. I joined a game which was based around the stories of HP Lovecraft – Call of Cthulu – and asked for explanations, finding myself next to the man that I didn’t realise that I was going to marry, and I was instantly hooked.

There’s something about table-top roleplaying games. They free the imagination in wonderful ways and are amazing training for authors. I suppose it’s like acting in a way as you can become so many different characters without any physical constraints. The setting is based around the game, the dungeon master or games master and your own imagination. You can be anything!

I hadn’t got a clue what I was doing, of course and my darling husband-to-be (that I didn’t realise yet) patiently talked me through how to create a character and the rules of the game. He took all the time he needed, and I blossomed under it. Over the next year I became a demon fighter, an elf with a chest wig, a male thief with appalling taste in pipe tobacco and a 1930s socialite with a knack for finding adventure and an embarrassing lack of virtue. It was immense fun.

Using roleplaying to explore characters, settings and stories is wonderful training for any author and I heartily recommend it. I’ve played so many different characters in so many different ways and now I find that I have a wonderful portfolio of characters to draw on when I sit down to write. Not only that, but over forty years of roleplaying, I’ve trained in a flexibility of imagination that is so useful when sitting down to create a world. I didn’t even realise how much I was learning as I played – I just had fun!

And it wasn’t a bad way to start off a marriage, either. As broke newlyweds, having a hobby that needed only a few dice, paper and pencil and an industrious imagination was incredibly cost effective as well as a wonderful way to lose ourselves in strange worlds together. We’ve had such a blast over the years, and it is still one of my favourite ways of spending time with my darling.

When I found out that my old sparring partner, Finn Cullen, had created an RPG based on Malory Towers, I was thrilled. As Finn was responsible, I know that it’s going to be fun, and it’s based on Malory Towers! I discovered the Malory Towers books back in the 1970s, and as a broke kid in an industrial town, it seemed as foreign a world as Narnia or Sherlock Holmes. I adored those books, and now that they’re combined with my favourite couple’s hobby, I’m in heaven. I can make up a character that not only can enjoy the novelty of entering a post-war boarding school and dealing with the social complexities but also uncover secrets and solve cosy mysteries (in between cheering on or captaining the lacrosse team) while spending time with my favourite human. I can’t wait. I plan to perhaps dig out some old-fashioned lemonade to have as we play, along with some iced buns or I could make some spicy gingerbread for us as we settle in for the long, autumn evenings.

If Malory Towers is a fond memory and you’re interested in roleplaying, you can find Finn’s game here – Blaydon Grange. If you do investigate, I’d love to know what you think about it, or about roleplaying in general. I always love to hear from you.

At the time of typing, 8^th June 2025, I haven’t knowingly used AI. It isn’t necessarily a matter of principle or because I think people would disapprove. It’s more that I’m not exactly sure how to access it, and I’m far too nervous around technology to try it.

You may have noticed that I said that I’ve never knowingly used AI. To be honest, I’m not exactly sure what AI is. I use Google and I’m not sure how much AI is involved in their search engines. I know that they have a ‘AI answer’ at the top of their results which I usually ignore. I have spell checker turned on and I’ve used the ‘edit’ function in Microsoft Word, and now I wonder how much AI is in that. To be fair, I spend a lot of the time arguing with the edit function and refusing to put various commas in and take other commas out just because the editor said so. I will wear those misplaced commas with pride, because they make sense to me and the edit function doesn’t understand dialogue. But is that using AI?

I’ve made a couple of covers and some social media stuff in Canva. I’ve not taken advantage of their AI service, as I’m already intimidated by anything art and adding a machine that knows more about art and design than me only adds to the fear. But what about the art stuff that I’ve used? I don’t know if some of the backgrounds have been AI generated, or some of the clip art. I can’t draw anything for myself. I have the artistic abilities of an elderly microwave. I rely on the pretty things on Canva and hope that I’m getting it right regardless of whether AI is involved.

I’ve commissioned book covers from GetCovers (who are awesome), and I’m pretty sure that they don’t use AI, and they have brilliant customer service. If I want to, I could rely on the Amazon ‘book cover design service’ where you can pick and choose from all sorts of options, and I don’t know how much AI is involved in that, either.

I can sometimes get an idea if AI has been involved in writing a book. I’ve come across them when I’ve been dipping into research and it’s always been well laid out, well formatted and somehow felt stale, like flat soda. It’s frustrating, as you have to double check everything, and digging out details can be tough, but I suppose that they can be a start to real research as you’ll at least get some starting points.

 This is where I start to get concerned about AI. As you know, I’m a fiend for research and there are AI aids to research all over the place. It’s the top spot when I google, for example, whether ice cream was available in York in 1890 (answer – probably). The trouble with an AI search, however, is that it shows the most popular answer. It doesn’t always show the correct answer. And if people keep clicking on the top, popular answer then that answer becomes even more popular and even more repeated. If that answer is wrong, then a wrong answer is endlessly repeated and you can end up down all sorts of conspiracy rabbit holes. Those searches are good for no-one.

As a test, I asked a writer friend (not saying who) to ask ChatGPT what inspired their writing. It was wrong. The AI answer was out by about half a continent and several centuries. It was so wrong that we had to take time to stop laughing. It also worried me. Trying to find out the truth about the type of barley grown in 16^th century barley for a work of fiction is one thing but relying on AI to check about anything to do with health or wealth is dangerous ground. From my extremely uneducated experience, AI in research may be a place to start, but it’s a ride and it’s hard to get off and find genuine, fact based information where you can stop.

Finally, we get to why I wrote this. I read a post on Reddit and it made me laugh. It was followed by comment after comment stating that it was written by AI. It may have been, I don’t know. The post, however, was written in the sort of style that I’ve used. I don’t want people to think that I’m using AI. Mainly because I think that if you credit me with AI use then you give me too much credit for understanding tech. This is just me.

And as this isn’t AI, there isn’t a neat sentence at the end that wraps everything up. I may use AI in the future. I’ve heard that writers will sometimes get AI to draft out their ideas and then tidy up the prose. I could argue that this is like the step between writing with a pen in a notebook and using a word processor. I am old enough to remember the time before the magic of the backspace button and I adore the possibilities of ‘find and replace’ when I realise that I’ve got a name wrong, or copy and paste when I need to change a section instead of having to re-write the whole lot laboriously in longhand. Maybe AI is the next step in helping authors. I don’t know if it would work for all and I doubt that it would replace the spark that lights all enjoyable reads, but it may help produce more good books. I will watch from a safe distance.

To sum up – at the time of typing, I don’t use AI, mainly because I don’t know how and I’m not sure that it would help. If I use AI in the future, I’ll own up to it and be clear. And here’s an article which I wrote without help, apart from the whole ‘spellcheck and edit functions’ thing, but perhaps may be suspected of being generated by a non-human, if you’re looking for it. Do Werewolves Eat Dog Biscuits?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Please comment, especially if you can reassure me that AI is easy to use and I can’t get into trouble while using it.

I’m typing this in the middle of May and I have lost around 500 Facebook friends since the beginning of the year. And I’m okay with this. In fact, I’m actively working for this, and I’m enjoying an unexpectedly odd journey.

It started like this – I had 4.6k Facebook friends. I believe (but could be wrong) that the upper limit is 5k Facebook friends. I felt that I was running out of friend slots and it worried me. This account is my author account, and as it’s my author page, I’m not hugely discriminating about who I accept as a friend. Perhaps they like a book I’ve written or are interested in one of my articles and I am incredibly flattered that they have taken time to look me up. However I have physically met two people out of that 4.6k, and while there’s perhaps a couple of dozen more where I have valued, meaningful and cherished relationships, most of them are a mystery to me.

I considered going through that friend list and trying to weed out the hustlers, con-artists and schmoozers that approach everyone on Facebook. It felt a little daunting, looking at a list of over four thousand and making decisions. It could take ages. Did I really want to free up those slots that badly?

Then I got a Facebook message from someone that I adore. They were getting some vile messages and as I was listed as a friend of the abuser, my friend wondered if I knew much about them. I checked, and I couldn’t help them. It was just someone that had been added many, many years ago. That added to my concerns. I could be running out of friend slots and I could be linked with people who’s values I emphatically didn’t share. I decided that I had to bite the bullet and go through that friend list. But not in one go. I don’t think that I would ever have the stamina to go through a whole 4.6k entries in one sitting.

Facebook has a feature with a list of all those on your friend list who has a birthday that day. I decided that each day I would go through the list, have a look at that person’s page and either wish them a happy birthday or unfriend them. The idea was to keep as many as possible while losing those were unlikely to miss me. I’m less than half a year through, and it’s been a revelation.

I made some guidelines for myself. The first one was that if an account hadn’t been active for over a year, then I would unfriend. I thought that was reasonable and that I could always send a friend request if things changed. I’ve been kicking around on Facebook as Lyssa Medana for a long time and it makes sense that some people have drifted away. Some people have abandoned Facebook because of concerns that are caught up with ethics or security. Others find different social media or walk away from the whole online stuff altogether. I can’t possibly argue with that.

There was a surprising number of inactive accounts as I went through. Some were obviously forgotten. A couple had me wishing them Happy Birthday back in 2019 as the last posts on their page which left me somewhat confused. Some had the traces of someone flouncing out of Facebook, which was usually hilarious. Some were obvious traces of a business that failed to launch with half a dozen posts fervently extolling editing services/art/beauty products/sewing alterations before their owner either abandoned hope or found a better platform for their work. Sadly, a couple had memorials on them because the original owner of the page had passed away. As I didn’t know or speak with any of those, I unfriended respectfully, leaving the page for those who knew and loved that person.

Another guideline was if the account was overrun by adverts selling weight loss products then I was getting out of there. It’s often a sign that the page has been taken over, with posts from the original poster being several years old. Besides, some of those ‘before and after’ pictures are seriously creepy and you can’t convince me that it’s always the same person. I look at them and the message seems to be ‘Hey! Use our weight loss product that will cost you a fortune and not only will you lose unrealistic amounts of weight but you will also grow three inches and change eye colour.’

As an aside, I loathe it when people post adverts on my timeline. It just feels presumptuous, and a little like I’m supposed to endorse something that I know nothing about. If I spot something like that on my timeline, I usually remove it, unfriend the person who posted and block. If someone in real life tried to force me to endorse a random weight loss product, I would absolutely avoid them thereafter – at all costs!

I also unfriended all the would-be Romeos (ewwww!) who had vowed eternal love at the first sight of my profile pic. My profile pic is of a glass of wine and if I thought that they were real, I’d be somewhat concerned. I also try to unfriend those who post with ‘do you know that you’re entitled to claim…’ in my messages as I go along, but I’m hoping to clear out any strays from that bunch as I go along. No-one has tried to sell me on one of those MLM for a while, possibly because I look too poor, but who knows. Anyway, those would go as well.

If the account is active, I have a scan through the posts. I know I’m a bit of a hypocrite here. Most of my posts are from me sharing a post by someone else. It could be someone who I respect and I’m sharing info on their work, or news of a release or a YouTube video, or, more likely, it could be a funny meme. There’s a lot of cats, a few dogs and plenty of cartoons. I’m not going to judge anyone for lack of original content.

I start from the position that I’d rather have a friend than not, and if there’s a doubt then that stays. And everyone has their own values and beliefs. I’m not going to tell anyone what they should or shouldn’t believe, and I am a great believer in live and let live. I hope that I’m welcoming to everyone, no matter what box society tries to put them in. I’m also uneasily aware that it’s easy to live in an echo chamber. I want to hear all sorts of views and opinions, even if they aren’t exactly the same as mine. How else do I work out if I’ve got stuff wrong?

The guidelines continue with unfriending anyone who promotes hate. I reject those who try to frame sections of people as lesser or not quite human. We are all in this together. I’m also vehemently pro-vaccinations and pro-choice, and I’m proud to own it. I also unfriend those who are in any way promoting cruelty, whether to children, adults or animals. Kindness online literally costs nothing.

Scrolling through some of the posts has been an eye-opener. I’ll sometimes scroll through and think to myself, Sweetheart, you need to work on your self esteem. Sweetheart, you need to work on your self respect. Sweetheart, you can do better than this, think about what you’re doing and saying and be better. Sometimes I scroll through and want to give someone the biggest hug. Sometimes I scroll through and think, If you knocked on my door right now, I would hide behind the sofa.

The best part, though, has been finding amazing people that I don’t normally see. There are people on Facebook who are witty, and clever, and kind and insightful and I have loved seeing their posts. I’ve laughed and sighed and basked in their brilliance and frantically liked everything in the fading hope that the algorithm will show me more of them. I’m rarely on Facebook for more than five minutes at a time. I dash in, scroll quickly, pick up messages and dash out. Now I feel like I’m missing wonderful people saying amazing, thoughtful, thought-provoking things and it’s making me glad that I’m going through the birthday lists. It may be their birthdays, but I have found a great deal of joy.

The reason I decided to write about Facebook friends is some sad news I found on there. There was one particular Facebook friend that I ‘bumped into’ regularly. I had never physically met them, and I don’t think that I’d ever been on the same continent as them, but I loved their posts. They were funny, irreverent and their posts brightened my day. Sometimes we would exchange puns, trade off stories and ideas and just generally share jokes and the brighter side of life. The love that they had for their partner glowed like the sun and it was heartwarming to see. I realised that I hadn’t seen a post from them for a while and went looking for their account. There was a notice that my friend had passed. I may not have met my friend face to face, but that didn’t ease the sorrow that I felt.

This post is a way for me to deal with that sorrow. I’ll make a donation to the food pantry bin in their name next time I’m in the supermarket as a way of remembering them and I’ll cherish those of my friends on Facebook that make my life so much better even though we live miles and miles apart. In these days of social media, perhaps friendship and the ties between human beings need to be redefined and expanded. Kindness, joy and love can come through many channels. I think that it’s worth being intentional about choosing and refining those channels.

I’m still accepting friend requests, though I check their profile a little closer now. I’m still flattered that anyone thinks of me. I still feel blessed by the welcome of good people from all over the world. And I will absolutely keep sharing jokes and memes and cats without any shame at all. If you want to join me on Facebook – you have been warned!

I want to review books because it means that I read wider and I am appallingly narrow in my reading matter. I keep getting distracted by romantic novels which I am not reviewing mainly because I keep skipping the steamy bits so I couldn’t do the book justice. For a change, I thought that I’d be a smart alec and have a look at research type books. I thought I could show off a little. Instead I found myself wincing.

I found The History of Spices by The Papyrus Author sort of interesting. There’s a lot of information in there, it’s quite well laid out and logical, but it does read like a paper from a really good High School student. It’s an excellent paper, and would get an A+, and it covers a lot of information. Unfortunately, as it covers from ancient times to the modern day and takes a global perspective, it doesn’t go into much depth. Let’s take one paragraph:

Run Island and the Nutmeg Trade: One of the most notable episodes in the English pursuit of spices was their claim over Run Island in the Bandas. Though smaller and less known than its neighbours, Run Island was rich in nutmeg. This possession became a point of contention between the English and the Dutch.– The History of Spices by The Papyrus Author Chapter Six The Age of Exploration – Quest for the Spice Islands

For someone wanting an overview, this isn’t a bad start. For someone who wants to write books, this is awfully dry. I had a quick look at Wiki, and the battle for Run Island was an epic tale. The island is part of what is now Indonesia and the area was the main source of nutmegs until the nineteenth century. The natives feared the Dutch and so signed a contract with the English to take over instead. The Dutch were incensed and laid siege to Run Island but were held off by 40 Europeans and their native allies for just over four years. When the English leader fell, the English retreated and the Dutch moved in. They slaughtered, enslaved or exiled every man, woman and child on the island, destroyed all the nutmeg trees and allowed cattle to roam free. The Dutch even came back every year to make sure that no-one had tried to resettle the island when they weren’t looking.

That is an epic story! You have to ask – how did it feel to be one of those European defenders, so far from home? How did it feel to be one of the native islanders who tried to make a deal with the least bad invader? How did it feel to watch the Europeans sail away, presumably taking the guns and cannons with them, and knowing that vengeance was approaching? What would have happened if any of the natives had managed to survive that vengeance? How about a pirate base or a curse or lost magical items left behind after that dreadful punishment? That’s where research should lead. I’d recommend it as a resource as I hadn’t even heard of Run Island before this, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a main resource.

I wouldn’t recommend Emperor’s Kitchen: Wholesome Recipes from Ancient Rome by Ava Taylor much at all. I’m not ashamed to admit that the author knows more than me, but I found the whole thing confusing. It felt a little like it was translated from Latin to English by a Martian. There are recipes there that are interesting, but they assume a lot of background knowledge. The formatting is a little crazy as well. It’s a shame. The Feeding the Crew:A One Piece Cookbook by the same author is awesome. It’s based on a manga series called One Piece and there are some great recipes in there. I quite fancy trying some of them.

Perhaps one of the problems I’m facing is that when I’m looking to review a book, I’m looking for recent publications. I suspect that AI may be happening. I also had a quick peek at Fragrant Pages: The Story of Perfumery Through History by Oriental Publishing. Any High School student would be proud to hand it in to an expectant teacher. It suffers from the same defects as The History of Spices. It’s strangely written, not particularly well formatted and irritating. It’s not a bad place to flick through to get places to start research, especially if you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited and don’t have to pay extra for it or give it shelf room. However it may be worth looking at works that date from before the AI explosion. If you’re looking for a background on perfume, Essence and Alchemy: A Natural History of Perfume by Mandy Aftel seemed quite fun when I dipped in, and it’s also on Kindle Unlimited – and makes sense.

So looking at recent non-fiction books for research at random was a fail. On the bright side, while I was having a wander around Kindle Unlimited, I spotted a few books about coffee. I’m sure that I can make use of that in my fiction.

I wish I could have thought up a snappy title for this, but ‘Food for Thought’ is probably best kept for another article and ‘Fruit of Research’ was way too cheesy. Remember the reason for research is to stop the author looking like an idiot. This is definitely a piece that can be ignored. However I thought I’d mention a few things that may be useful, especially to those writing speculative fiction. The bag of apples and carton of strawberries that you load into your cart in the supermarket may not necessarily be the same as the apples and strawberries available to someone in medieval Europe. If that detail is important to you then this is a reminder to check stuff like ‘history of the strawberry’ to get the background. If it isn’t, just keep it in mind and keep writing.

If we’re talking about Kurt and Gwendolyn in Maine, most fruit is going to be available for most of the time. However you can slant things to reinforce the plot. If it’s November 10^th then there will be plenty of cranberries around, perhaps even some grown locally. It’s a great way to show the run up to Thanksgiving and Christmas. Fresh strawberries, however, are likely to be imported, expensive and possibly not the best flavour. If you want to give a sense of summer, however, then perhaps our two characters can be buying fresh strawberries from a roadside stall in July. There probably won’t be many locally grown mangoes, though, if you want to be realistic. It’s easy to check what’s available and when and use to those facts to give depth to the story.

Lord Kurt and Miss Gwendolyn in London have less choice. There were some ships that used ice and salt to preserve their cargo but they were few and far between and obviously there are no delicate imports coming in by air (depending on the plot, of course). Lord Kurt and Miss Gwendolyn may have attended dinner parties where the pineapple was rented – I’ll let you google the background to that, because it’s fun and so very human. Bananas were also a curiosity, mentioned in Jules Verne Around the World in Eight Days. Even in the great port of London, most food was seasonal. However, as sugar was now widely available, there were plenty of preserved fruits. There were even such exotic preserves coming in such as pickled mango or preserved ginger.

There are problems with researching fruit. Determined aristocrats would try and grow almost anything in heated glasshouses, and fast ships with captains wanting to make money could make a lot of different fruits available to those with vast wealth. Researching ‘when did pineapples reach UK’ tends to show results going back to the seventeenth century and the nobility. In reality, fresh pineapple was still something amazing and unusual for most people when I was a youngster in the seventies. When Lord Kurt and Miss Gwendolyn were fighting against evil around Whitechapel and Limehouse, ordinary people still had food that was either local or easily imported. The trick is to work out when things become widely available. The dark Count Dominic may flaunt his wealth by having fresh strawberries served in November at his society dinner parties together with expensive preserved cherries and apricots in brandy, but the poor wretches he preys on in the slums of the East End are limited to apples or perhaps roast chestnuts from a barrow, together with sugary jam and sticky preserves. If you’re not sure, keep it simple and hurry past.

Kurt the Barbarian and Gwendolyn the Healer have a different set of challenges. Soft fruit like strawberries and raspberries is tough to preserve without sugar, freezers or refrigeration. It’s best to eat that sort of fruit as soon as possible after picking. Some fruit could be preserved in honey or wine, but that would be a luxury item. Even the fruits that were easier to store, such as apples, didn’t necessarily travel well. You had to stick with something local.

I’m going to be honest here, this is a rabbit hole that could swallow me whole. This is the point where I decide that no-one needs to know the menu. If I’m going to jump into that, I need more than a safety line; I need a parachute. Do I really need to know details if Gwendolyn the Healer presents Kurt the Barbarian with a dish of fruit? It’s just that a dish of fruit sounds so very drab compared to, for example, a dish of strawberries/bowl of fresh figs/some juicy guava.  

It’s important to remember that you created this world and therefore you have the absolute power to put anything anywhere. If you want to have stands of mango trees and date palms dotted around the icy wastes of the frozen north then you have the power to put them there. You run the risk of looking like an idiot, but it’s your world and your choice.

There are issues to consider which can add or subtract to your world building. Humans are meddling creatures who don’t leave things alone. Selective breeding of fruit and vegetables has been going on since the first farmers, so what the Romans knew as, for example, melons are considerably different to the melons you get today. If you are tying your world closely to real world societies and cultures, it’s worth having a quick glance at the history of food in that area. Not only have humans changed the fruit by careful breeding, but they’ve carried fruit with them as they travelled the world. Wonderful coffee comes from Brazil, but the plant originated in Ethiopia. Amazing tea comes from Kenya, but tea originated in China. If Kurt the Barbarian is looking over the fields that are sticking closely to 12^th century Oxford, he won’t be looking at fields of pumpkins. For the same reason, if Gwendolyn the Healer is searching for herbs in the marketplace of Tarsh, it’s perfectly reasonable for her to bustle past a stand selling pomegranates or cucumbers, but even in that great crossroads, you won’t find papaya. And if Kurt the Barbarian and Gwendolyn the Healer are exploring the hills and coves on a tropical island, they’re not going to find many pear trees.

Of course, if you’re creating your own world, you can always make up names for the local fruit. I avoid this if I can as I am very bad at taking notes, I lack focus and I worry that the fnura fruit that I describe as yellow and sweet in chapter two could end up red and spicy in chapter ten. This is why I stick closely to real world equivalents. It’s to stop me looking like an idiot. And that is the entire point of research. Well, that and I love going down rabbit holes.

You can find more of the articles on Research and the Author here. I’d love to hear from you and please let me know if there are any areas you would like me to discuss.

I love this time of year. I love the crisp air and the changes in the leaves. I love hot chocolate and pumpkin spice and gingerbread. The nights are drawing in and it’s time for snuggling down. I stock up with as many candles as I can get away with, drag out all the blankets, and enjoy the feeling of being safe and snug away from the weather. All the spooky stuff that comes with Halloween is a wonderful bonus.

I can never keep away from the supernatural when writing, and this time of year I embrace it with enthusiasm. In the last few years I’ve made a thing about posting loads of stories in October and I want to continue. And of course I’ve also signed up to the amazing October Frights again, which is always good fun.

This year I’ve decided to go ghostly. One of my favourite characters is Kane, the quiet, unassuming, somewhat shy lad who can talk to ghosts. Well, it’s more like the ghosts insist on talking to him whether he wants to listen or not. He’s such a sweetheart. I thought I would spend some time with him this October and I’ve made some provisional plans. I’ll be the first to confess that my ability to stick to plans is spectacularly bad, but I’m quietly confident on this one.

I’ve decided to share six new stories about Kane during the October Frights. I’ve had these ideas rattling around for a while and I thought it would be a good time to take him in a slightly new direction. The poor lad doesn’t know what’s coming for him. As a way of celebrating the spectral season, I’ll be republishing one of Kane’s old stories every day in October outside of the October Frights for a trip down memory lane. I really enjoyed revisiting them as I was reminding myself of his journey, so I thought I would share. The first story featuring Kane was back in March 2019, and as all his stories had been scattered around with months in between, I thought it would be nice to have a reminder.

While I’m talking about Kane, please send me all encouragement and I hope to finally get a novel with Kane as the hero out before the end of January. He deserves a little bit of the spotlight and possibly a chance of romance. I can’t see it being a series, and I’m sure that I’ll write the occasional short story afterwards, but I think he deserves to be a hero for at least a little while.

October won’t be only about Kane, though. I still plan to keep up the instalments of ‘Invitation Accepted’ and the guest posts for #HazardousToYourSanity and perhaps a post or two on research as I’ve had a few ideas about that. Mind you, I’ve mentioned how abysmally awful I am at plans.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and if you have the same soft spot for Kane. Let me know what you think of the plans – and the chances of me managing them!  

I read in weird ways. I suppose it partly comes from too much screen time and partly because of the way my reading has evolved. I have the Kindle app on my phone and it has been a blessing when I’ve been waiting for my darling son. But my elderly phone gets drained by the kindle app so I often read on the kindle app on my laptop instead. As I don’t seem to sync them up right, I’m usually reading one book on my phone and a different book on my laptop.

But sometimes I review books and I’ll be dipping into that book at the same time as I’m dipping into the sort of stories that I don’t want to admit to reading – at least not in front of my teenage son. Not only is Romance not dead but it’s available in large quantities if you know the right apps. Of course, sometimes I dip into places like Royal Road as well, and I’ve rummaged through quite a few old books via the Gutenberg project which I usually download and then read on the Calibre app (which is also pretty good for formatting my self published stuff).

That’s just the ebooks. I usually have a non-fiction physical book around to dip into as well. I’ve been looking into a lot of the superstitions as research for my series on #HazardousToYourSanity so I’ve got a small hardback reference on local superstitions by my chair and another paperback book of fables in my knitting bag.

This isn’t something to be proud of. I’m surprised that I can mostly keep straight with the different plots, especially if you add in all the extra plots that are happening in my own writing. However I’m not so much ashamed of it. What is making me uncomfortable is the typos.

Neil Gaiman said that no matter how much you proofread a story, the first thing you would see when you opened a physical copy would be a typo. And it’s true – only God is perfect. I’ve heard that there are rug makers hand knotting expensive rugs who deliberately put an error into their pattern because they don’t want to be disrespectful. I know that there are typos in my work. I know that I’ve messed up grammar, clarity and punctuation. I know that I have no room to talk. However I can’t stop spotting typos. And as you can tell from my reading practices, I have a lot of opportunities to see them.

The trouble is, when you are rattling away with a great streak of inspiration, you miss stuff. Spell checkers can only do so much. One story (which I adored and have re-read a few times) had someone who ‘titled’ their head. I suspect that it should have been that they ’tilted’ their head. Both words are correctly spelled without context, but I would be intrigued at someone who ‘titled’ their head in confusion. I’m not blaming the author – it’s exactly the sort of mistake I would make. Once upon a time I wouldn’t have noticed but a few experiences of proofreading and I’m picking up misplaced commas.

Mind you, I may think that the commas are misplaced but I’ll be the first to admit that my punctuation is far from perfect. I know that when I went back and re-edited The Forgotten Village I felt almost like I was translating into English. There were so many mistakes and I have no room to complain about any author.

I’m spotting all these tiny mistakes, feeling a pang of sympathy with the author and moving on. I am in no place to criticise at all. And I’m not in a place to criticise facts either. I may have written articles on research, but I know that I still get things wrong. After all, sometimes you don’t know enough to know how wrong you’re being. A lot of the time, it doesn’t matter one tiny bit. I was very much enjoying a cozy mystery (which I’m not detailing here because I absolutely do not want to throw shade on someone who’s a far better writer than me) and they had a brief throwaway description of someone threshing hay. You don’t thresh hay.

My actual real life knowledge of farming is limited to driving past some fields. However I’ve read a lot about medieval farming and I’m great if we’re talking about out of date practices. Threshing is beating a crop until the seed separates from the stem. Hay isn’t harvested for seed. It’s grass that is preserved to feed livestock over winter. You make hay or you can put hay in bales but you don’t thresh the dratted stuff. Do you know how much impact this had on the story? Zero, zilch, nothing, nada. The author did nothing wrong, but the reader, that is, me, needs to get a sense of proportion. I just can’t help noticing them.

Today, when I caught another tiny typo, I thought I would get this off my chest and send sympathetic vibes to all the authors out there. I also want to beg, plead and beseech that if you spot a typo or a mistake of fact in anything I’ve written – please tell me. I’d be grateful if you were kind, but I’ll take it on the chin if you just pointed out what I got wrong with honesty.

I also feel confident that as I’ve written an article on mistakes there are going to be a few in here. Please be kind.

After a comment by Ruth (who is awesome and I’m incredibly grateful for their encouragement), I thought I’d talk a little about Darren, Jasmine and the problems of being a writer.

Darren is one of the first characters I ever wrote about. He was the irascible, no-nonsense, straightforward vicar in The Forgotten Village and went on to be a main character in Digging up the Past, and the three books in the Tales from the White Hart series. I never thought that he would have a romantic interest. I imagined him as having the looks and body of a Greek god and the emotional bandwidth of a shipping container.

Jasmine was introduced as a character in More Tales from the White Hart and was a ‘stray’, that is, a werewolf without a pack. She’d been chased out because she didn’t fit in with the expectations of the pack and didn’t want to marry where she was told. I had an idea that she would perhaps be part of the LGBTQ+ community and was excluded for that. She was beautiful, shy, defensive and prickly. I wasn’t planning on matching her up to anyone else.

Of course the characters took one look at each other and fell in love – hard!

When I’m working out characters, I’ll sometimes write conversations between characters to get a sense of them. It’s like a small studio where the characters come out and talk, move around and generally work things out. This isn’t the first time I had characters do something unexpected and once again I was trailing after them going, ‘wait, what?’ I was not impressed. Apart from anything else, Darren is far too old for Jasmine. The characters took no notice of me whatsoever.

I can see why they fell for each other. Darren absolutely adores Jasmine. She’s sweet, honest, straightforward and kind. She’ll get involved with trouble to defend someone who needs support. She never thinks about her looks or figure but just carries on being her. He loves that he can feel a little bit protective of her while trusting her completely. She has all the warmth that Darren struggles to show and she very much lights up his life.

Jasmine had a huge crush on Darren almost from the start. He’s old enough to be an authority figure while still being young enough and single enough to be attractive. There is something reassuringly stable about Darren. He may be a neat freak with no ability to demonstrate affection, but he’ll always be there for the one he loves. Darren is unwaveringly loyal, considerate and devoted. He is a rock who will never play games but will always be straightforward and clear. That is something that would call to Jasmine after the disruption and hardship she knew before they met.

I was a little worried about the age gap. To be fair, so was Darren. Jasmine didn’t have the confidence to say anything so was pining away for Darren while Darren was even grumpier than ever. However there was an unfortunate mix up with a love potion which meant that Jasmine and Darren became passionate lovers while under the influence and the rest is happy history.

I’ve known a few couples with significant age gaps. Some have been incredibly happy but one or two have been less than healthy. I think that as Darren is not likely to try and manipulate Jasmine, and Jasmine is certainly only after emotional security, this could be a good relationship. That doesn’t make for good stories, but I can see a few ideas in the distant future, if I ever get some proper writing done!

As for trying to show how people can suffer because of how they love, I thought I’d hold onto the idea that Jasmine was under pressure from many in the werewolf community for not conforming to what was expected. And at least she found happiness.

And I have had a fun time skimming through some of the older stories and enjoying the memories that have come back. It’s been a reminder of how much I enjoyed writing and perhaps I ought to get going again!

And a little news – I’ve been accepted on #HazardousToYourSanity for regular posts, so keep your eyes out for my series on British Folklore and Superstitions (some posts by other authors are a little spicier than I write, so you may like to use your judgement). And I have also signed up to October Frights again, run by the amazingly wonderful AF Steward, so while I won’t be posting every day in October as I have in the past, I hope that there will be some pleasantly spooky goings on. I’ve also had a few ideas about the next set of articles about Research and the Author and I hope to have them ready for you soon.

I’d love to hear requests, ideas or thoughts so please feel free to leave a comment.

Hugs and good health to all.