News
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To write books you need to read books
The publishing business likes to focus more on the positive than the negative. So here’s a truth you hear rather too rarely. Agents everywhere are drowning in unsolicited manuscripts from hopeful writers that are so bad they make the poor souls who receive them want to weep. Not bad in the sense that they’re sub-standard.…
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Why writers shouldn’t give up on AI
I’ve never been terribly interested in flavours of the month. AI being one of them. None of us can avoid AI, of course. If you’ve searched for something on Google you’re using it already. There are things about it I hate, naturally. The idea of using technology to create actual scenes of a book is…
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Write About What You Don’t Know
Here’s a wonderful myth, one you’ll hear retold from writing class to university up and down the land: ‘Write about what you know.’ I almost fall off my chair laughing typing those words. Shakespeare never set foot in Denmark but he wrote Hamlet. He almost certainly never visited Italy, yet he wrote Othello, The Merchant…
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Venice Noir launches at Harrogate
Just back from a surprisingly warm and sunny Theakstons Crimewriting festival at Harrogate where we launched the international edition of Venice Noir 2026. Here are some of my co-conspirators after the event — Suzy Lishman, our resident super pathologist who has a fantastic panel on her hands this year; Philip Gwynne Jones, Erin Kelly, historian…