Blog

I Am a Lousy Blogger

I haven't written a blog post since March 2013. This is not for lack of subject matter, but more that I tend to revise and revise my posts until they say exactly what I want, and that takes time. So I haven't had anything I wanted to say so badly that I made time for it. Even this simple paragraph seems an imposition: I've erased it and restarted about six times now! Most of my writing time these days (in fact, since March 2013) has gone to short stories.

But I have big plans for the New Year! Watch this space.

Still watching?

High Definition Poltergeist

Have I mentioned that I wrote a book of ghost stories?

The other day I stumbled upon an old BBC documentary about the “Enfield Poltergeist” (and yes, it was a search for videos of the Enfield rifle that brought me there). The Enfield Poltergeist is one of those famous poltergeist cases that was witnessed by so many people, including journalists, photographers, police, neighbors, and investigators from the Society for Psychical Research, that it’s difficult to refute, at least in terms of the physical phenomena.

Six Elements of a Good Adventure Story

Every story is an adventure story!

Sometimes I write notes or instructions to myself. For example, one evening while I was waiting for my son to finish his swimming lesson, I wrote the following “six elements of a good adventure story.” I wrote them because I’d been wondering what it was about certain stories, novels and films, that I liked so much. What things did the good stories have in common, I asked myself, and what were the mediocre or bad ones missing?  Six things came to mind, so I wrote them down.