‘The Unpierced Heart’ by Katy Darby Review

  Richly Satisfying This compelling novel was originally called ‘The Whores Asylum’ but was apparently renamed to appease a certain chain of stationery stores who thought the title a bit much, despite being happy to stock popular S&M erotica and those amateur photography mags with half-naked women on the front. I’m not knocking either publication […]

The Authorpreneur: how to build a platform and strategy for your writing that engages your readers

CITY UNIVERSITY LONDON, 22.10.15 Authors, however their work is produced, need to act more like businesses than Romantic poets, although as we learned the two are not mutually exclusive. As part of City University London’s Inside Out Festival, three experts in this area, Heather O’Connell, Katy Darby and Mark Edwards explained how. Heather O’Connell  is […]

Diamond Roads Origins Part 6

I wrote other spec scripts and sent those off to production companies and the BBC but no one was interested. I thought about evolving a novel out of one of them, a non-science fiction story set in a boys’ school, but the story was incredibly dark and I had become wary about wasting yet more […]

Diamond Roads Origins Part 5

Adapting ‘As Good As It Gets’ and hearing Charity’s unceasing voice in my head gave me the idea of writing ‘Diamond Roads’ as a novel so, over six months, I did. It was hugely exciting. Every day I would look forward to finding out what each character did. The evolution of the story came to […]

‘The Copper Promise’ by Jen Williams review

An epic fantasy novel that actually has an ending! That alone would get it an above-average helping of stars but this novel is also a multi-faceted adventure that gleefully subverts a number of beguiling but insidious conventions, like the expected appearance of the main female character and tedious notions of manhood associated with warriors. We […]

Diamond Roads Origins Part 4

I’d wanted to write a piece of TV science fiction for some time. I thought about ‘The Psychometric Man’ but I couldn’t call it that. In the meantime, ‘Engines of Creation’ by K Eric Drexler, a book that posited the idea of nanotechnology, had gradually been popularised since its publication in 1986. I started to […]