Giant Squid Creations

When I was a little boy I had a princess in just the same way other young children might have. She was beautiful and wore sumptuous gowns – sometimes – and at one point needed rescuing by a dashing young hero or three. But that wasn’t why she was a princess or at least why she was important to me. You see my princess could look after herself and had sass. When someone told her they were going to execute her, she gave him lip. She fought her own battles, commanded soldiers and didn’t take crap from anyone. But she did all that without losing one iota of ‘femininity’. There is nothing ‘butch’ about Princess Leia. So I grew up with a strong female hero figure every bit as cool as her male counterparts. Yesterday I got to meet, ever-so briefly, the real woman who brought that character to life and it was a wonderful experience. My own interaction with Carrie Fisher was very short, she got the photo I wanted signed, said my name as way of greeting/confirming I was the right person and w...

I don't know how the site does the analysis but if you insert text you've written into it, it analyses it somehow and tells you what famous writer you write like. So I put the first page of The Scarlet Ring in and was pretty chuffed with the result. Here's hoping I get the success he's had. I write like Neil Gaiman I Write Like . Analyze your writing! Keep dreaming!

In her essay, On Ghosts, Mary Shelley laments the way the world is changing to a more rational, more understood and more linear place. The way the sun is known to be a star filled with gas as opposed to a mysterious orb that might be the chariot of a god, for instance. In this she neatly summarises a general feeling within the Romantic movement and with the Gothics in particular – that the new ways following the various revolutions at the end of the 18th century were potentially robbing us of our sense of wonder; hence the romanticising of the past and the insistence (at times) in the existence of the supernatural. As progress has not slowed since that time it is little wonder these feelings have lingered and the rebellious medievalist spirit of the Gothics has continued in many forms of storytelling as well. But while mad monks, ghosts, mouldering castles and star-crossed lovers gave escape from the modernising of the world, Shelly went further and commented on the very progress she...