Animation Magazine just published my article How the ‘Small Prophets’ Team Crafted the Show’s Handmade Homunculi, which ventures behind the scenes on Small Prophets, the charming six-part comedy series about an unassuming man who makes alchemical magic in a quiet corner of English suburbia. Created, written and directed by Mackenzie Crook, Small Prophets was produced for the BBC by Blue House Productions and Treasure Trove Productions, and started streaming on Apple TV from October 7, 2026.

• Read the complete article here

As a firm fan of Crook’s earlier show, the wonderful Detectorists, I had high expectations for Small Prophets, which was broadcast in the UK by the BBC earlier this year. I wasn’t disappointed. Small Prophets oozes Crook’s trademark warmth, wit and sense of wonder, as it encourages you to invest your emotions in a delightful ensemble of fractured characters valiantly navigating the challenges of their ordinary lives.

Not so ordinary are the steps taken by the main character Michael Sleep (Pearce Quigley) to solve the mystery of his girlfriend’s disappearance. Encouraged by his father Brian (Michael Palin), he sets about growing three gargoyle-like ‘homunculi’ inside glass jars in his garden shed. This trio of tiny humanoids — the King, the Queen and the Seraph — are supposedly capable of prophecy, and will answer any question asked of them with the absolute truth.

Will Michael pluck up the courage to ask these peculiar creatures the one question that keeps him awake at night? You’ll have to watch the show to find out.

In the meantime, why not check out my new article on the stop-motion animation techniques that were used to bring the homunculi to life. The animators were Will Anderson and Ainslie Henderson, who employed a hybrid approach combining stop-motion with digital animation, while the physical puppets were fabricated by UK animation studio Mackinnon & Saunders.

I spoke at length with two members of the Mackinnon & Saunders team, co-founder Ian Mackinnon and workshop supervisor Richard Pickersgill, plus freelance concept designer Glen Southern. Between them, they told me exactly how they created the homunculi, taking initial artwork by Mackenzie Crook himself and developing it into a set of fully functional stop-motion puppets.

Here’s a brief extract from the article:

At one point in the story, the King escapes from his jar and rampages through Michael’s shed. Mackinnon & Saunders fashioned a loosely-jointed stunt puppet for the live-action shoot. “The tentacles had wire in the tip so we could get some shape,” says Pickersgill. “There were no joints in the cape — it was just the weight of the silicone that gave it movement.”

For shots of the King attacking Michael, Richard Pickersgill and Ainslie Henderson became puppeteers. “We attached rods into the King’s palms,” Pickersgill relates. “Pearce Quigley held the puppet while myself and Ainslie clawed away at him with the rods.” Freshly emerged from his jar of liquid, the King is a slippery customer. “Between every take, we used lube and Vaseline to make him look more slimy. By the end of the day I was covered in lube!”

To learn more about the intricacies of fabricating the stop-motion puppets for Small Prophets, visit the Animation Magazine website now and read the article in full. The article will also appear in the December 2026 print/digital issue of Animation Magazine (No. 363).

• How the ‘Small Prophets’ Team Crafted the Show’s Handmade Homunculi — read the complete article

Main photograph: Lauren Patel as Kacey and Pearce Quigley as Michael Sleep in “Small Prophets” – Copyright © BBC, Treasure Trove, Blue House Productions. Homunculus image courtesy of Mackinnon & Saunders.

Woo-hoo, check out my latest article in Film Stories, the UK’s biggest film magazine! Issue 61 has just hit the streets with two collectible souvenir covers, and features my 6-page interview with veteran VFX supervisor Dennis Berardi, twice BAFTA-nominated for his work on Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and The Shape of Water and founder of Toronto-based visual effects studio Mr. X Inc.

On this occasion, I spoke with Dennis about his long-standing relationship with film director Paul W. S. Anderson, known for pulse-pounding movies like Event Horizon, Alien vs. Predator and the Resident Evil series. Here’s a brief extract from the article, in which Dennis discusses his experiences on the set of Anderson’s 2020 fantasy adventure Monster Hunter:

Having completed his sixth zombie movie, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, Anderson took on the sweeping fantasy adventure Monster Hunter. Another Capcom videogame adaptation, the film propels U.S. Army Ranger Captain Natalie Artemis (played, naturally, by Milla Jovovich [Anderson’s wife and perennial leading lady]) to a world teeming with unbelievably ferocious creatures. The strange planet’s rolling dunescapes came courtesy of the Namibian desert, while Cape Town Film Studios hosted an ambitious stage shoot. “Namibia is just this crazy landscape,” Berardi says. “I’ve never seen spiders so big in my life! We built a tent village, and we were tying up our boots to the top of the tents so scorpions wouldn’t get in. It was quite an experience.”

The Namibian creepy-crawlies were nothing compared to the film’s voracious predators. The monsters of Monster Hunter include the insectile Nerscylla, the sand-swimming Diablos and, a favourite of the fans, the dragon-like Rathalos. Berardi recognised the fine line between honouring this lethal menagerie’s gaming origins, and meeting modern audience expectations in terms of realism. “Jurassic World had just come out,” he notes, “and, what with Game of Thrones as well, dragons and dinosaurs were everywhere. We really felt the pressure to achieve that level of quality with our creatures.”

Like all the monsters in the film, the Diablos was primarily a digital creation. However, for a scene in which Artemis battles the beast while clinging to its horny skull, Jovovich donned a safety harness and rode atop a full-scale Diablos head. Mounted on an articulated gimbal, the SUV-sized noggin threw the actor around like a bucking bronco.

“Milla was like, ‘Why is this thing so big?’” says Berardi. “It was crazy, and the fact that she was willing to do it … amazing.” For Jovovich, riding the Diablos was the latest in a long line of action scenes in which she performed her own stunts. “Milla’s very physical, very fit. The amount of times I’ve scanned her, poked and prodded her, put her in contorted positions, hung her from wires upside down, thrown her against the wall! Each time I approach her, Milla will be like, ‘Okay, what’s it going to be this time, Dennis?’”

To learn more about the globe-trotting adventures of Anderson and Berardi, grab yourself a copy of Film Stories and read the article in full.

• Film Stories
• Mr. X Inc.

It’s publication day for the brand new 2026 edition of my interdimensional thriller String City, first published by Solaris Books in 2019, now reissued in paperback and for Kindle, and available from Amazon stores worldwide.

I know what you’re asking. What the heck is an interdimensional thriller?

Well, I could answer by telling you String City is a weird fantasy novel about a private detective who spends his days grappling with rogue gods and unlikely monsters. Or I could tell you it’s a science fiction romp set in a rain-soaked metropolis that’s all tangled up in complicated knots of cosmic geometry. Or I could tell you it’s a hard-boiled crime novel packed to the rafters with murder, mayhem and more suspects than you can shake a stick at.

All these things are true, which makes String City a tricky book to categorise.

So I shan’t bother trying. Instead, I’ll let you read the introduction to the new edition, hoping it might give you some idea of what was going through my head when I wrote the damn thing. After that, it’s over to you.

Way back in 2005, my short story The Wooden Baby was published in a now-defunct magazine called Realms of Fantasy. It was a light-hearted fantasy-noir mash-up about a detective who can hop between dimensions simply by slipping on his rather remarkable coat.

Six more stories followed, during the writing of which I developed the rain-soaked world of my unnamed gumshoe protagonist into a universe of monumental proportions. Since then, I’ve collected all seven stories into a single volume: The String City Mysteries.

The final story of the original sequence, Lifestrings of the Loving Couple, was first published in 2012 by 40K Books. As I planned my detective’s next adventure, I realised I had enough material to create not just another short story, but a whole novel—the very novel you’re holding in your hands.

But how to approach it? I’d written the short stories with an ‘anything goes’ attitude, taking great delight in mixing genres and twisting tropes. However, while I felt this no-holds-barred approach worked well with short fiction, didn’t a novel demand a certain rigour? If I was going to expand this odd little universe I’d created, shouldn’t I consider calming things down a little?

Then I got to thinking. The whole reason I’d written the short stories in the first place was to give my imagination free rein. Enlarging the canvas was no reason to shrink the ambition.

Never mind dialling things back.

It was time to dial things up.

Once I’d made the decision to go big, only one question remained: just how many ideas did I want to incorporate into the novel? This question quickly became a challenge: how many ideas could I cram in before the damn thing fell apart under its own weight?

My response was inevitable: I included all the ideas I could possibly think of. Then I added more… and more… and more. The result is either a smörgåsbord or a pot-pourri (take your pick of culinary metaphor) with something for everyone who keeps one eye on the heavens and has a taste for the strange.

I hope you’ll find things in these pages that make you smile, shiver, or question your place in an essentially unfathomable cosmos. If nothing else, I hope you’ll agree with my interdimensional gumshoe when he remarks that: “None of it makes sense. But somehow it all hangs together.”

Special thanks to Jon Oliver, Michael Rowley and Kate Coe at Solaris Books for helping me hurl this novel out into the cosmos on its first publication by Solaris Books in 2019. I’d also like to thank Shawna McCarthy, Giuseppe Granieri and Letizia Sechi for going out on a limb with the original stories that spawned it.

• Buy the new paperback edition of String City
• Buy String City for Kindle

I’m thrilled to present my first byline in Film Stories, the UK’s biggest film magazine. Issue 60, out now with no less than three collectible souvenir covers, includes my 6-page interview with Douglas Scroggins III, owner of Scroggins Aviation, a Las Vegas-based company that supplies all manner of flying machines to the movie industry.

Here’s a brief extract:

I’ve interviewed Doug on a number of occasions, and each time he’s regaled me with stories about how he refurbished a disused aircraft cockpit for use as a film set, or de-rotored a helicopter ready to be mounted on a hydraulic motion platform. Whether it’s an Airbus A320 or a Convair 880, a UH-60 Black Hawk or a CH-47 Chinook, Doug talks about all his ‘birds’ with an affecting combination of deep technical knowledge and, yes, love.

But there’s one question I’ve never asked him. How exactly does a skinny guy from Nevada wind up furnishing blockbuster movies with crashed airliners, camera-friendly jet fighter cockpits, and helicopter body shells designed to be flung around in front of greenscreens on six-axis gimbals?

To discover the answer to this burning question, grab yourself a copy of Film Stories and read the interview in full.

What’s the carbon footprint of a fire-breathing dragon?

Frankly, I’ve no idea. But I do know, by choosing to print my self-published novels on groundwood paper, I can lower their CO₂ emissions by at least 15%. That’s what Amazon says, at least, and I’m prepared to believe them.

So I’m pleased to announce that every paperback edition of my Ultimate Dragon Saga will now be printed on groundwood stock. Not only is it better for the planet, but I actually prefer the look and feel of this lower carbon paper. The off-white colour is easy on the eye, and the softer texture brings with it a lovely tactile quality that reminds me of all the sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks I read in my youth, back in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

In switching to this new paper, I’ve taken the opportunity to tweak the formatting of these three dragon novels. When I first set up Dragoncharm for self-publication back in 2014, I matched the font size to the original HarperCollins paperback edition, and adhered to a standard Amazon KDP template for overall layout.

Reflecting on my choices later, I wished I’d gone for bigger text and wider margins. But my priority at that point was rolling out the rest of my back catalogue, so any thoughts of reformatting went on the back burner. Now, at last, I’ve fired up the stove again and made those long overdue changes.

First, I’ve increased the size of the Garamond font from 10.5pt to 12pt. This, combined with the calming coloration of the groundwood paper, makes the text much easier on the eye. Second, I’ve widened the margins, so the pages are less crowded. As a result, the page count has rocketed from 400 to around 550. However, because the groundwood stock is lighter, the new edition weighs about the same as the original, despite the increase in bulk.

I’ve also made a few small revisions to the cover. The front cover retains the full colour illustration I created for the original release. However, instead of using Amazon KDP’s rather limited ‘Cover Creator’ feature for the spine and back cover, I’ve extended my artwork to wrap fully around the book.

After satisfying myself that the newly repackaged Dragoncharm is as good as I’d hoped, I rolled out the same changes across its two sequels, Dragonstorm and Dragonflame. In the fullness of time, I plan to switch the rest of my back catalogue over to groundwood paper.

Oh, and if as a reader you’ve gone paperless, rest assured that all my books are also available as ebooks for Kindle.

• Buy The Ultimate Dragon Saga from Amazon

Keep your eyes peeled for a brand new edition of my interdimensional thriller String City, coming soon!

Described by The Eloquent Page as “smart hard-bitten detective noir with a cosmically mind-bending chocolatey centre,” String City was first published by Solaris Books in 2019, and is now out of print.

The novel chronicles the adventures of a down-at-heel private detective trying to solve a baffling series of cases involving Titan crime lords, big-business vampires with lethal metal fangs, sinister skeletal Fools and the all-powerful spider goddess Arachne.

No wonder he’s confused.

Luckily there’s help at hand in the form of Zephyr, a woman from our world running from her haunted past, and the Scrutator, a mild-mannered robot with aspirations to become (you guessed it) a private detective. With the help of our hero’s never-ending supply of unlikely gadgets – not to mention his rather extraordinary coat – they set out together to save the universe.

If all that sounds like a lot to take in, you’d be right. Springboarding off an earlier series of short stories, I wrote String City with one thing in mind: to pack the novel full of every wild idea I could come up with … and then pack it some more.

For a long time I worried the book would collapse under its own weight. Thankfully it didn’t, and I was delighted when comments started coming in from readers who seemed to be on my – admittedly slightly twisted – wavelength. “String City is balls to the wall insanity,” wrote review site Pile by the Bed, “a mash of quantum physics, classic mythology and noir detective fiction … It is so crazy that it should not work. But it does.”

I’m currently hard at work producing a brand new self-published edition of String City. It’s essentially an exercise in repackaging – I have no reason to make changes to the text. The reprint will be ready to roll later this year. Be the first to get news of the launch by subscribing to free email updates this website.

In the meantime, you can whet your appetite by reading The String City Mysteries, an anthology of the seven short stories that started this whole adventure and which, collectively, form a prequel to String City.

• Buy The String City Mysteries from Amazon

You’re plotting your next novel. Naturally, you want to populate its pages with a cast of unforgettable characters. But where do you start?

With these fifteen Character Archetype Cards, of course. They’re my version of the various character wheels and charts you’ve probably seen knocking around online. The idea is that you set up each of your main characters as a different archetype, bless them with basic drives and ambitions, and set opposites against each other in the hope of striking a few narrative sparks.

Here’s how they work. Each card has five key elements. First comes the Archetype itself, the overarching descriptor for your character. They’re all here, from Creator to Commoner, Joker to Sorcerer, and more besides.

Second is your character’s Heart’s Desire. This is their ultimate goal, the engine that drives them to make all their decisions. Closely allied with this is the third element, Agenda. This summarises what the character does in order to achieve that goal.

The fourth and fifth elements are a matched sets of Attributes, one Positive, one Negative. Think of them as essential character traits, modes of behaviour and expression displayed by your character as they move through the story.

The arrangement of the cards is deliberate, by the way. Each row represents a certain category of archetype, with each row skewing to a slightly different compass point. I’ve resisted the urge to label the rows – I’d rather let you decide what the categories actually are, and how they relate to each other.

As for how to use the cards, that’s also up to you. Match a character to the card that seems to call their name. Assign cards at random to your nascent dramatis personae and see what happens. It really doesn’t matter. What counts is that you have fun as you immerse yourself in the comfortable ocean of plotting and preparation.

Have you done your plotting and preparation? Great! Next comes the most important part of all. Now that you’ve finished using the Character Archetype Cards … it’s time to get rid of them.

I’m serious. Delete this web page from your bookmarks and forget that you ever downloaded the Character Archetype Cards graphic as a handy JPG. If you printed the damn things out, burn them immediately.

Go further. If you’ve scribbled your carefully curated list of characters down in a notebook, rip out the page and recycle it responsibly. Composting is a good option. If you prefer to do things digitally, dump your files in the trash – yes, all of them – making sure you cancel that seductive option to undelete at a later date.

Why destroy all that good work? Because the truth is that archetypes aren’t real and no one person is just a single thing. To put it another way, the population of Planet Earth has now exceeded eight billion people, which means its surface is clogged with eight billion unique characters, each one marching through life with their heart set on their own unique desire, pursuing their own unique agenda, with their attitudes and behaviours and thoughts and emotions influenced by a zillion different things ranging from the attachments they formed in infancy through to what they had for breakfast this morning and the effect it’s having on their digestion. If you want your characters to be even half as interesting as real human beings, you must ensure that each of them is a one-of-a-kind.

Having destroyed all your beloved character notes, you may now be feeling a little despondent. Don’t worry. The good news is you can finally start writing. Stick to your plans by all means – all that work wasn’t for nothing and the ideas it generated are still bubbling through your head – but allow for the possibility that, sooner or later, your characters will do something of their own free will, breaking free from their archetypal straitjackets and steering your carefully constructed plot in new and unexpected directions. When this happens it’s time to celebrate, because you just received a clear signal that your characters have started to breathe of their own accord. My advice is to let them. The card game is over. This shit just got real.

Yes, I know the question you’re itching to ask. Why bother giving you these wretched cards in the first place, if all I want you to do is throw them away?

Because sometimes, when your writing muscles are all cramped up, playing cards can help you shake out the knots.

That’s why I’m happy to make you a gift of my Character Archetype Cards. I hope you’ll have yourself plenty of fun as you flesh out a dashing hero from the bones of a Monster, or imagine their romantic partner as a lawless Rebel, or conjure up a dastardly villain who’s as Innocent as the day is long. Everyone loves a restless Adventurer, especially when their sidekick is a disarming Joker with a special knack for finding truth in humour. And what better way to stir things up than by throwing an unpredictable Disruptor into the mix?

If nothing else, your used collection of Character Archetype Cards will make an interesting set of novelty coasters.

If you’ve got as many questions as I have about the craft of creative writing, you’ll know how important it is to try out new things. The more you learn, the more you feel in need of lessons. Every day, as they say, is a school day. That’s what my Writer’s Alphabet is all about. It’s not a dictionary of answers, more a lexicon of suggestions. Some of the ideas are my own, some are based on nuggets of wisdom I’ve picked up along the way, borrowed from people far smarter than myself. It’s not a list of rules (rules are made to be broken, right?). But it might give you a nudge in the right direction, just when you need it.

You’re writing an outline for a new story. Quite naturally, you want to pack it full of drama. How do you do this?

The answer’s simple. You find a way to add the word BUT to every single sentence you write.

Here’s an example:

Jack sets off across the rope bridge BUT torrential rain has made the planks slippery. He manages to keep his balance BUT he drops his map in the river. He finally makes it to the other side BUT a landslide has taken out the path. He scrambles down the rocky slope BUT there are crocodiles snapping on the river bank …

Adding BUT turns everything you write into a high wire act. Each time your characters think everything’s going to be okay, yikes, they discover it isn’t. The word BUT brings jeopardy. The word BUT lights fires. The word BUT turns the screw as tight as it will go, transforming the simplest of intentions into the most daunting of challenges.

If you’re afraid of overdoing it, don’t worry: you can’t. This is an outline, right? An outline is just a set of starting blocks designed to be kicked aside the instant you start the race. Yet it still has a duty to perform. It needs to be solid. It needs to work hard.

Above all, it needs to be packed full of BUT.

If you’ve got as many questions as I have about the craft of creative writing, you’ll know how important it is to try out new things. The more you learn, the more you feel in need of lessons. Every day, as they say, is a school day. That’s what my Writer’s Alphabet is all about. It’s not a dictionary of answers, more a lexicon of suggestions. Some of the ideas are my own, some are based on nuggets of wisdom I’ve picked up along the way, borrowed from people far smarter than myself. It’s not a list of rules (rules are made to be broken, right?). But it might give you a nudge in the right direction, just when you need it.

Do you want to know what to do with adverbs? I’ll tell you.

Ditch them. Trash them. Toss them overboard and watch them sink without trace. Rip them to shreds and trample their pitiful remains into the ground. Don’t ask why. Just do it. I’ll wait …

Have you done it? Good. Now start seeking out alternatives. Instead of writing Alice ran quickly, think hard about how Alice actually looked when she took to her heels. Did she sprint? Did she scuttle? Did she dash, or gallop, or scamper? Perhaps she darted, or maybe she bolted. There’s even a chance she skedaddled. Whatever it was Alice did, it’s up to you to tell us, using the most vivid language you can muster.

As you embark on your search for the best possible verb, you may feel the urge to consult a thesaurus. That’s fine. Don’t be embarrassed. Whatever gets the job done. But don’t get carried away, and never, ever, choose a word simply because you think it sounds clever.

Choose it because it’s right.

Have you made your choice? Good. Do you see how vibrant your writing has suddenly become? You’ve probably achieved a new level of precision, too. You may even have made it more concise. Three miracles for the price of one. How can this be? Because every word counts.

Unless it’s an adverb.

If you’ve got as many questions as I have about the craft of creative writing, you’ll know how important it is to try out new things. The more you learn, the more you feel in need of lessons. Every day, as they say, is a school day. That’s what my Writer’s Alphabet is all about. It’s not a dictionary of answers, more a lexicon of suggestions. Some of the ideas are my own, some are based on nuggets of wisdom I’ve picked up along the way, borrowed from people far smarter than myself. It’s not a list of rules (rules are made to be broken, right?). But it might give you a nudge in the right direction, just when you need it.

Forget April Fools’ Day. Today marks the official publication of Spellcraft: The Art of Golden Lightning, the final volume of my fantasy trilogy for young readers. The novel is written under the pseudonym R.L. Ferguson and published as a German language edition by Ravensburger. Want to know what it’s all about? Here’s the blurb:

When Lucy first lays eyes on the Bright One, she is entranced. Here is the world’s most powerful sorceress, returned to London to free the Spellcrafters from oppression. And Lucy is meant to help her. But what if the Bright One is not the long-awaited heroine everyone expects her to be? To find the answers, Lucy and her friends must track down a lost magical city. But time is running out and the fate of the world rests in their hands.

Cloaks that grant invisibility. Medallions that tell stories. Swords that slice the world in two. In the secret workshops of the Spellcrafters, true wonders are forged in the heart of London … with immense talent and a touch of golden magic.

This final Spellcraft volume marks the end of Lucy’s exploits among London’s secret Spellcrafter community. It also means I’ll be hanging up my trusty R.L Ferguson hat for a while … a hat which served me well through not only this latest trio of novels, but also the School of Alyxa and Catacombia trilogies. Will R.L. be writing any new novels in the future? Subscribe to free updates and you’ll be the first to know!

• Buy Spellcraft: The Art of Golden Lightning (German edition)