Blog

There is no glittering frost outside today and the lengthening nights shut me in earlier and earlier. To make it through such dark hours I want comfort and enchantment, and for this I turn to the books I read over and over as a child. Some favourites, such as Susan Cooper’s ‘Dark is Rising,’ and… Read more

All my book projects are waiting for other people to do various things before I get on with them so I’m back to working on my new fiction project and thinking about character names. This one’s a historical fantasy set in a version of seventeenth century England, and the names need to be convincing. So… Read more

So, this is it. It’s almost a year since my PhD was awarded and I’m branching out into my own uncareer – a hodgepodge of things that earn money and don’t, with the main nexus being creative writing, and archaeology.* It’s taken me a while to get my head around how creative writing and archaeology… Read more

I’m in that limbo between sending off a book draft – hurrah! – and the return of peer review – ouch! Or ouch it probably will be because it is highly unrealistic to expect that everything about the draft is marvellous and in no need of criticism. The review will help me to make the… Read more

Took a walk around this rather spectacular modern earthwork and quarry and of course had to head down the research rabbit hole it offered. It is a disused quarry with some form of track and what looks like an enclosure or paling. A bit of investigation through old OS maps shows how the land use… Read more

One thing I’ve wanted to explore more this year are digital methods to record inscriptions on stone with their monuments. What I really want to do is practice recording inscriptions using Reflectance Transformation Imaging, but this needs some basic kit that I haven’t yet got. For the moment, in a rather lazy betwixtmas sort of… Read more