Tag Archives: writing

Why do we still have ‘women’s fiction’ as a category in bookshops? Amazon, for instance, lists ‘Women Writers and Fiction Books’ as one of the major fiction categories, and ‘Women’s Popular Fiction’, ‘Women’s Literary Fiction’, and ‘Women’s Short Stories’ as ...

I’ve only recently started to appreciate collections of short stories. While I’ve always enjoyed short stories as individual entities, sitting down to read bite-sized stories never really appealed to me. Instead, I always preferred to get stuck into a novel, ...

Having been racing my way through many SFF book series, I started to note the differences amongst how they approach certain issues of construction – how they deal with the continuing story, individual novels as part of a larger whole, and ...

It seems fitting that Breaking the Glass Slipper would make its live debut at Nine Worlds Geekfest in London, a convention that prides itself on diversity, panel parity, and accessibility. As such, we were there flying the flag for women ...

I am currently on a mission to watch everything Joe Gilgun has ever appeared in. From Misfits to This is England to Pride to Preacher, he has quickly become one of my favourite actors of all time, while also being ...

Guest post from Paige Orwin, whose debut novel, The Interminables, is out now, published by Angry Robot. Early on, I decided that I didn’t want any traditional fantasy creatures in The Interminables. No vampires, no werewolves, no figures taken from the mythology of ...

This week, Charlotte talks to erotica and horror (as Keris McDonald) author Janine Ashbless. No topic is off limits with this wordsmith. They discuss pornography vs erotica, what frightens a horror writer, and pacing stories as a kind of ‘teasing’. If you ...

Dystopia and other post-apocalyptic tales have long been popular in the SFF world. From YA dysfic to scifi horror (robots! aliens! WMDs!), writers have great fun imagining all the weird and wonderful ways society, the world, even the universe, as ...

When you set out to write a novel or short story, do you find yourself naturally writing a male protagonist? What about peripheral characters, do you unconsciously refer to them as he? Gender is an inescapable part of character development. ...

I recently found myself in a heated argument with a friend about an author’s intentions and whether readers should respect them in always reading the book in the way it was intended to be read: from start to finish. The ...