As a Fantasy writer, I spend a great deal of time thinking about and playing around with magic – how it works, who can do it, the necessary limitations it has and the cost it must incur to the user. So it’s a natural step to start thinking about...

If you’re writing Fantasy, names can be a real headache. You want names that are distinctive, evocative and resonant, without sounding ‘just made up’, and that put a real strain on the old creative gland. The answer lies, as it almost always does when writing Fantasy, in History. For ...

Here’s my schedule for the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, which I’m looking forward to greatly. It’s always a superb occasion with so much to see and do. Hope to see you all there. Making Magic with Michael Pryor – Saturday 24 August 2013 at 2.30 pm. ‘Create complex, believable worlds for...

Ah, the Internet and its wondrous offerings! I stumbled across some archival video and the memories came back. Believe it or not, younlings, there was a time when petrol companies successfully linked themselves with the back to nature movement, all in the days before unleaded fuel, too. Driving and...

Okay, this is a long, long blog entry about our recent trip to the Marquesas Islands. The Marquesas Islands. Officially the world’s most isolated island group (thanks, Wikipedia). The nearest continent is North America, some 5500 kilometres away. A few tiny volcanic dots in the vast blue immensity of...

Imagining the future is the best way to prepare for it, and some of the best imagineers are writers. Try these five very different visions of our future. Neuromancer. A cool future. William Gibson took film noir and mashed it with computer culture and created a future that has...

Look around the bookshops and the libraries and you’ll see series all over the place. On some stretches of shelves, you could be forgiven for thinking that EVERYTHING is part of a series. And, as an aside, don’t you hate browsing in a library, spotting a book that looks...

I don’t get excited about shopping for much, but two items do get the old heart racing: plastic containers (a story for another time) and luggage. I love luggage. Suitcases, carry-on luggage, backpacks, laptop bags, duffle bags, multipurpose hold-alls. I get absorbed in details of hard-sided vs. soft-sided, construction...

Oh, how I love history. And books. And books from history. Here’s a real gem: the contents of the 1911 edition of The Empire Annual for Girls, which should tell you a thing or two from the title alone.   THE CHRISTMAS CHILD — MRS G. DE HORNE VAIZEY...