Thanks to a recent bout of sickness, which had me confined to bed for three days, I recently had the time to re-read this childhood favourite, the ‘Chronicles of Prydain’ series by Lloyd Alexander. It’s many years since I last read the books, but I must have read them multiple times, as so much of the narrative and dialogue was […]
“Got to start by finding it, have we? Not allowed to start by looking for it, I suppose?“ The above words, spoken by Puddleglum the Marshwiggle in CS Lewis’s The Silver Chair*, always resonate strongly with me. They are especially meaningful in these days of artificial intelligence (AI), where it seems every question can be answered at the touch of […]
The Hunger Games. Jane Eyre. Watership Down. Brideshead Revisited. Bridget Jones’s Diary. Anna Karenina. The Secret Garden. The Hobbit. What do these stories have in common? Not much, at first glance, other than that they’re widely recognised as classics, much loved by successive generations. Whether or not each story is to your taste – not all fans of Brideshead Revisited […]
This week’s prompt was to choose a ‘what if?’ question and explore it some more. I chose: ‘What if electricity and any other power source was unavailable for a full week? What would happen?’
This week’s prompt was to write a new scene raising the stakes for a character from a previous scene: I chose the one from SFF tropes and themes.
This week’s prompt was to write a scene that comes after the one already written for SFF tropes and themes.
This week’s prompt was to write a travelogue description of either some place in our world outside of the UK, or some place wholly invented.
This week’s prompt was to write a scene that combines a trope and a theme from science fiction and fantasy.
Our two advice columnists respond to a plea from the marvellous land of Oz.
Mr Darcy offers advice to a confused young prince undergoing a traumatic family bereavement.