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)

Let’s get something straight. I’m not a robot. I’m a flesh-and-blood human author alarmed by the rising tsunami of AI-generated books threatening to wash away everything that’s sacred about art, beauty, the meaning of life, tea, cake and, by the way, international copyright law.

Adding insult to injury, I’m flabbergasted by the emerging need to assert that the books I write (indeed, everything I write, or have ever written, including this blog post) is generated by my squishy human brain and converted to digital form solely by the action of my fingers bashing away on a computer keyboard. In short, there’s nothing artificial to see here, nor has there ever been, so move along, please.

Thanks goodness, then, for the Human Authored logo scheme, created by the Society of Authors in partnership with the US Authors Guild, which enables authors like me to stand tall and declare their writing is the creation of a living human being, and hasn’t been spewed out by generative AI. Having enthusiastically signed up to the scheme, I’m now able to verify my work as being written by a human, and brand it as such using the official Human Authored logo.

The terms of the scheme mean I can use the logo on my most recently published books. Why not the rest? Because they were all originally published before 2020, in that halcyon era before AI developed the wherewithal to produce humanesque writing. This means the majority of my backlist is above suspicion (although the cynic in me suspects there will be people out there who won’t realise this, probably the same people who say, ‘Sheesh, check out those old-school computer effects,’ when they see the jerky stop-motion animation in the original 1933 King Kong).

This same cynicism gives rise to the niggling fear that, since only some of my books carry the Human Authored logo, some people might assume those that don’t carry the logo were written using generative AI, despite the self-evident ‘before 2020’ rule which means they can’t have been. The scheme’s FAQs acknowledge this dilemma thus:

• Q: What does it mean if a book doesn’t use the Human Authored label?
• A: The scheme does not imply that books which are not registered as Human Authored have been created with generative AI.

Despite this minor misgiving, I think the Human Authored logo scheme is a bloody marvellous idea, and I’m proud to be associated with it. As generative AI continues to impact all our lives, I believe it is vital that we clearly define and rigorously protect not only the human creative process, but what it means to be human at all.

• Find out more about the Human Authored logo scheme

During the seven wonderful years I worked at Cinefex, that legendary and much-missed journal of cinematic illusions, I wrote over 40 long-form articles on the making of films including The Shape of Water, Black Panther and Solo: A Star Wars Story. The focus was mainly on special and visual effects, accompanied by healthy dollops of animatronics, make-up, cinematography, production design … you name it, we covered it. More often than not, we interviewed the directors, too.

A typical Cinefex article was around 8,000-10,000 words (although many were much longer) and lavishly illustrated with behind the scenes photographs, VFX breakdowns and final frames. It wasn’t unusual to conduct a dozen interviews, frequently more, all of which had to be cleared by the studio PR department in advance … often far in advance of the film’s release, thanks to the magazine’s long lead time.

For any one article, my assembled interview transcripts could easily run to over 50,000 words. Wrangling all that information into a coherent narrative was a monumental task, one which Cinefex editor-in-chief Jody Duncan likened to ‘wrestling a rhino to the ground.’ She was absolutely right but, I’ve got to tell you, once you’d put that big old beast to bed, there was no feeling quite like it.

Recently, while digging my old Cinefex files, I came up with the idea of extracting the raw text from some of my favourite articles and republishing it here on my website. My heartfelt thanks go to former Cinefex publisher Gregg Shay for granting me permission to do this. Here are my selections – just click the links to dive in!

• Spectre – “Explosive Cocktail” (2016, Cinefex 145)
• Deadpool – “Smart-Mouthed Glory” (2016, Cinefex 146)
• X-Men Apocalypse – “Apocalypse Rising” (2016, Cinefex 147)
• Star Trek Beyond – “Cosmic Deconstruction” (2016, Cinefex 148)
• Ben-Hur – “Quick the Eye, Steady the Hand” (2016, Cinefex 149)
• Arrival – “Persistence of Vision” (2016, Cinefex 150)
• Kong: Skull Island – “A Lonely God” (2017, Cinefex 152)
• Logan – “Blood Father” (2017, Cinefex 152)
• The Fate of the Furious – “Life in the Fast Lane” (2017, Cinefex 153)
• Alien: Covenant – “Dark Materials” (2017, Cinefex 153)
• Thor: Ragnarok – “Team Thor” (2017, Cinefex 156)
• The Shape of Water – “The Patron Saint of Otherness” (2017, Cinefex 156)
• Black Panther – “Afrofuture” (2018, Cinefex 158)
• Pacific Rim Uprising – “Heft and Jank” (2018, Cinefex 159)
• Solo: A Star Wars Story – “Kessel Runner” (2018, Cinefex 160)
• Welcome to Marwen – “Small Wonder” (2018, Cinefex 162)
• Godzilla: King of the Monsters – “Ancient Gods” (2019, Cinefex 165)
• Spider-Man: Far From Home – “Grand Illusions” (2019, Cinefex 166)
• Game of Thrones: Season 8 – “When Dragons Go To War” (2019, Cinefex 166)
• Terminator: Dark Fate – “No Fate But What We Make” (2019, Cinefex 168)

All the text extracts are copyright © Cinefex and are reprinted on this blog with permission.

‘Tis the season to be jolly, and what could be jollier than a Christmas ebook sale?

Throughout the 2025 festive season, all the ebooks shown above will be selling at a reduced price at selected Amazon stores worldwide. In some cases you can save up to 50% on the regular cost!*

So, if you’re looking for a holiday bargain, or can’t decide what to spend that Amazon gift voucher on, you’re in the right place. Buy all three novels in The Ultimate Dragon Saga (Dragoncharm, Dragonstorm and Dragonflame) for under £6.00. Pick up the Stone trilogy at the same reduced price, starting with the epic fantasy Stone & Sky. If crime’s more your thing, travel back to the Neolithic age with my prehistoric murder mystery Talus and the Frozen King, or hurl yourself into strange new dimensions with The String City Mysteries.

Alternatively, try my Dragoncharm spin-off novel The Dragons of Bloodrock, or explore the making of your favourite blockbuster movies with Creating Godzilla vs Kong and Creating The Matrix Resurrections.

Oh, one last thing … if you’re a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, you’ll be delighted to know all my ebooks are available for you to read absolutely free. Now that’s what I call a Christmas miracle!

*Savings vary according to title and territory. Sale ends 5th January 2026.

I can’t believe it’s 1st October already! The leaves are turning yellow and the nights are drawing in. But before we start talking about Halloween and, dare I say it, Christmas, I’m delighted to announce the official publication day for Spellcraft: Power of the White Sun, the second volume of my latest fantasy trilogy for young readers.

Set in modern-day London, the series continues the adventures of young Spellcrafter Lucy Fairwright, in a hidden world where a bustling society of adepts practice their age-old magical craft. Spellcraft: Power of the White Sun is written under the pseudonym R.L. Ferguson and published as a German language edition by Ravensburger. Here’s the blurb:

“Tell them to run!”

No sooner has Lucy heard the disembodied voice speaking inside her head than chaos erupts around her. Sinister glowing figures storm the Spellcrafter Winter Faire and steal one of the magical world’s most valuable jewels. But there’s worse to come. All across London, Spellcrafters start disappearing under mysterious circumstances. What’s happening in the city? Only the voice in Lucy’s head seems to have answers.

But can Lucy really trust it?

• Buy Spellcraft: Power of the White Sun (German edition)

Buried treasure. You can find it anywhere. A forgotten corner of a dusty cupboard. A waterlogged ditch in a muddy field. Or the pages of an century-old family photo album.

I inherited the album in question some years ago. It languished on a shelf with its companions until, one day, I began the monumental task of scanning the entire collection to create a lasting digital record. The task – still ongoing – has proved to be incredibly rewarding, especially with the album I labelled Vintage Edwards-2.

Vintage Edwards-2 contains a variety of snapshots taken by my grandfather through the late 1920s and early 1930s. One batch records a day out at Parc Howard in Llanelli, South Wales, close to where my grandfather lived with his family in Felinfoel. Another chronicles a seaside holiday in Weston-super-Mare in 1928, and includes shots of the grand pier with its 2,000-seat theatre, just two years before it burned down in 1930. A third batch captures the atmosphere of the 1929 Eisteddfod Proclamation, with further shots of the Welsh cultural festival itself, held the following year in Llanelli.

The photos really are my idea of treasure. Not only do they illuminate my own family history, but they also recall a forgotten pre-war era when cars had running boards, everyone wore hats and everything was tinted a nostalgic shade of sepia.

So where does Amy Johnson come in to all this?

I’ll tell you. Tucked in there among the family snapshots are two photos I’d always struggled to identify. The first shows a big old biplane called Seafarer sitting alongside another, smaller aircraft. The second shows an unidentified woman wearing a long skirt strolling in front of a plane. Both photos appear to have been taken on a beach. I remember browsing this album in my younger years and mentally tagging these snapshots “Some Old Airshow,” before moving on to the amusing pictures of my dad as a little kid in short trousers.

When I came to digitise Vintage Edwards-2, I became increasingly obsessed by this photographic odd couple. Although they’re unlabelled, context suggested they date from the early 1930s. Did they have airshows back then? I didn’t know. Maybe they were a record of a day trip to the seaside. However, while I could understand my grandfather being taken by that rather splendid aeroplane, why on Earth did he photograph some random woman just walking around?

The more I stared at the photo of the woman, the more I puzzled over it. Why had my grandfather taken the picture? Back then, in the days before smartphones, photography was an expensive business. The equipment was cumbersome and everything had to be processed and printed by hand. You didn’t waste a single frame of film. Every picture was precious.

This train of thought led to my eureka moment. Never mind why he’d taken the photo. I already knew the answer to that. He’d taken it because the moment it recorded was precious to him. Which led me inevitably to the question I should be asking.

Who was the woman in the photograph?

Feeling like a bloodhound following an elusive scent, I began searching online. I had in the back of my mind that the woman might have been famous. Maybe she was an aviator, one of those pioneering pilots like Amelia Earhart. But there wasn’t much detail in the photo, and her face was turned a little away from my grandfather’s camera. How was I ever going to identify her?

Fortunately I also had the photo of the two planes. A quick internet search for “Seafarer aircraft” yielded a number of articles about the very biplane my grandfather had snapped. These same articles told me the pilot of this historic flying machine was the famous English aviator Amy Johnson.

Suddenly everything began to align. Seafarer’s registration code was G-ACCV – the same code that’s visible (if a trifle obscured) on the plane behind the mystery woman. Could it really be Amy Johnson herself? The hair looked right. If only she was looking at the camera.

The clincher came in the form of a British Movietone newsreel from 1933, which shows Amy Johnson standing in front of Seafarer with her husband Jim Mollison. In the footage she’s wearing the exact same outfit as the woman in my grandfather’s photograph. All my doubts evaporated. It was definitely her.

More research completed the jigsaw. On 3 July, 1933, Amy Johnson and Jim Mollison arrived at Pendine Sands, the same beach on the south coast of Wales where, in the 1920s, Sir Malcolm Campbell had set several world land speed records. Their plan was to pilot their new De Havilland 84 Dragon Seafarer from Pendine to New York and thus become the first husband-and-wife team to fly across the Atlantic.

Amy and her husband spent the best part of three weeks waiting for favourable weather. During that time, crowds of up to 10,000 people filled the beach in the hope of seeing the couple, who were major international celebrities. Stalls sprang up, a funfair arrived, and Pendine Sands took on an exuberant carnival atmosphere.

The crowds continued to throng the beach until high seas forced the Mollisons to fly Seafarer to Cardiff Airport for safety. They brought her back to Pendine Sands early on the morning of Saturday 22 July, finally taking off on their epic journey around noon. The following day they made landfall at Bridgeport, Stratford, Connecticut … but not as they’d intended. Short of fuel, Seafarer crashed unceremoniously to the ground, injuring her pilots. After a brief stay in hospital, Amy Johnson and her husband finally reached New York City, where enjoyed the razzmattazz of a tickertape parade.

Pendine Sands is around 30 miles from Llanelli, just right for a day trip. I don’t know precisely when my grandfather made the journey, nor do I know if he took the family – they don’t feature in the photos. Since Amy’s outfit matches what she’s wearing in the newsreel, I wonder if he was there on the same day as the British Movietone team. I’ve identified the small plane parked beside Seafarer is a De Havilland Puss Moth air taxi from London – maybe that’s how the camera crew got to Wales?

These questions will probably never be answered. Never mind. I’ve answered the one burning question by identifying the mystery woman in my grandfather’s photograph as the legendary English aviator Amy Johnson who, in 1930, put her stamp on history by becoming the first woman to fly solo from London to Australia. That’s good enough for me.

As for the photos themselves, well, they’ll remain safe in their original album. I’m delighted to report that a set of digital copies now forms part of the spectacular Amy Johnson Collection at Sewerby Hall Museum in Yorkshire. My thanks to Dr. David Marchant, Museums Registrar and Keeper of Archaeology, for making this happen.

Photographs by Martin Edwards