On 1 April 2025, we left the UK and set off on an epic round-the-world adventure. Starting in Europe, we'll then head to Japan, New Zealand, Australia - and maybe some other places too. Oh and we'll ...

Today, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle claims that it downloaded pirated books to train its AI systems—the largest U.S. copyright settlement in history. The parties in Bartz v Anthropic...

I love my laptop – I’m writing this blog post on it. I can certainly type fast, so for the most part it makes sense for me to write straight into it. But, there’s something to be …

We all want to write – right? But our brains have other ideas. We’re surrounded by so many things all jumping for our attention – work, kids, family – and then TV, books, an…

At their most basic, stories are made up of two things – description and dialogue. What, how, and when your characters speak can do a lot for your writing. Dialogue can say something about th…

New Year’s resolutions – love them or hate them, they come up every year. The idea of turning over a new leaf for a new year appeals to me as a writer, a fresh start using a very visibl…

This might be the most beautiful library I've ever seen. Not that all libraries aren't inherently beautiful because they contain lots of lovely, lovely books - but this one is most definitely epic. This...is a library? The Grand Hall of the Austrian National library is unlike any library I've seen before and I've been to many grand houses. It's 80m long, over 14m wide, and has a domed ceiling rising almost 20m above.

A good writer has to be a big reader. But I think a good writer also needs to get comfortable with the sound of their own voice. Yes, you need to start reading out loud. But why? I hear you whisper…

YouTube video by Chran and Rae "Hit the Road"

Vienna is the capital of Austria and well-known for its music. It's Opera House is world-renowned and many of the world's greatest composers both lived and died here. In fact, you can find a whole bunch of them, playing together for eternity, in Vienna's Central Cemetery. Watch our YT Short vid about our visit When is "central" not "central"? If you're looking for the cemetery in the centre of the city, you're bang out of luck.

Creating a world your reader can truly be sucked into depends on your depiction of how your characters experience it. And this they do primarily through their senses. Here’s how to use them t…

It’s been a weird time for the papers of record. The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post have all made compromising to catastrophic judgment errors. Most recently, …

I'm not fond of small spaces - but I do like a cave, and they don't come much bigger than Grotta Gigante (or Giant Cave), which was featured in the 1995 Guinness Book of Records as the largest show-cave in the world. It apparently doesn't hold that title any more having lost it to a cave in France in 2010. But it's still stunningly, jaw-droppingly big.

In ‘The Hours’ by Michael Cunningham, one storyline follows Virginia Woolf as she spends, well, hours pondering over the first line of her book, “Mrs. Dalloway”. It’s …

What connects the 90s pop band Aqua with Vin Diesel and Superman? Answer - closed London Underground station Aldwych. Aldwych, is a now-defunct station close to Holborn, and this was where we started our tour with "Hidden London". Run by the London Museum, these tours focus on exploring closed underground stations dotted all around (or under) London. A few years ago we'd done a tour…

Some people love to listen to music when they write, others prefer silence. But whichever camp you fall in, a book playlist or soundtrack could really help you get into your writing zone. Here are …

After stumbling across the world's oldest library in Verona, we then discovered the world's oldest covered theatre not far away in Trento - clearly, there's a lot of old things in Italy. The Olympic Theatre (or Teatro Olimpico) was built between 1580-1585. It's still in use, and still has in place scenery from the first play performed there, Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex"

If you want people to engage emotionally with your story, you'll need to make sure your characters feel real. No matter how outlandish your plot or unusual your setting, if your characters feel real, your readers will find it easier to feel connected to your writing. There are lots of ways to do this, but here are three I think can often be overlooked.