Sometimes ideas hit you. Sometimes they don’t. The latter sucks. When trying to come up with an idea for a crime novel or novella, the last thing you want to do is to sit around for weeks pondering dark [...]
There’s a story to be heard on every corner and every bar in Scotland, but why, we ask, are they normally of the dark and murderous variety? I moved here seven years ago and have been a tourist ever [...]
Why do us Brits love crime so much? I mean the genre and not crime as an extracurricular activity. But before I bang on about my love of solving a case from my comfortable station as an armchair detective, let [...]
Books, TV shows, documentaries, news broadcasts, popular music…it’s everywhere. Crime drama, mysteries, murders, and detective stories. As a nation we’re hooked on them. Well, I know I am, and looking at the top rated shows on TV, so are [...]
What’s a mystery without a sensational killer? Well, OK, not every fictional mystery needs a good murder, but every fictional assassin is almost always shrouded in a good mystery. So what makes a sensational killer then? Or, more specifically, an [...]
Welcome to my world. I live in Victoria in a small seaside town, on the edge of 240 kms of awe-inspiring coastline called the Great Ocean Road. With its diverse coastal landscape of gorgeous golden beaches and towering limestone [...]
Lesbian romance novels cover a multitude of scenarios, themes, time periods, and galaxies, and the breadth of lesbian fiction widens every day. This is all fantastic news for our genre, and I love the variety of books now available [...]
By nature, we are a flawed species. No, I’m not Neil DeGrasse Tyson and I’m not about to talk about the Universe; it’s vastness and how people fit in. I am nowhere near as cool as him. I’m like [...]
Fairy tales are the first place we learned as queer kids that we weren’t allowed to exist, that the people in charge of happy endings would rather create alternate realities where nobody was like us. I think this is [...]
It’s no secret to avid readers that we come to understand ourselves and our world through stories. Fiction changes us. But it also, on some level, must affirm us. If people turn to story for help comprehending our place [...]