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Why do I have to wait months, sometimes even years, before I can get the next book in a series in the same size as the previous one? And why on earth do publishers insist on changing cover designs halfway through a series?! As a lifelong reader, there are certain things about books and publishing…

Ah, Paris… The City of Love, the City of Lights – and also the city in which my main character, Ambrose, discovers that rescuing damsels in distress isn’t always necessarily a good idea. I’ve been lucky enough to visit Paris twice, and it’s one of those places I’d happily return to again and again. From…

Much like dragons, I have a strange fascination with unicorns. I’m not entirely sure when or how this happened, but I suspect watching endless hours of My Little Pony as a child in the 80s might have had something to do with it. Whatever the cause, unicorns eventually became rather important to my own fictional…

My Mythical Menagerie series is currently making its way into German, and when I first decided to translate the books, I thought I had a reasonable idea of what that would involve. You take the English book. You translate it into German. You make sure the translation is correct. And then you have a German…

Writers often talk about the pain of finishing a first draft and discovering that they’ve written 120,000 words when they were aiming for 80,000. Then comes the agonising process of cutting scenes, killing darlings, and somehow losing 40,000 words without destroying the story in the process. I have the opposite problem. I’m an underwriter. Give…

My Mythical Menagerie series follows the adventures of Ambrose Davids, a young man who lives in London. Over the course of four books, he travels quite extensively. He visits Paris, Rome, Germany, Malta, Greece and a number of other places – sometimes by rather unconventional means – but London is always home. Now I’m planning…

When I wrote a throwaway line six years ago about my main character’s love interest having a brother who’d gone missing while backpacking in Thailand, I had no idea I would eventually write the story of what happened to him. At the time, Ben Miller barely existed as a character. He was simply Sarah’s missing…

If you thought we were done with the Mythical Menagerie series – then you were wrong! Hunter’s Calling is the prequel story no one asked for, but that I couldn’t resist writing. It’s the origin story that explains how Stalker became the man Ambrose clashes with time and time again. He came to Thailand looking…

Forget the beautiful, singing mermaids of popular culture. In Asian folklore, mermaids can look like human-faced fish and may have flesh capable of granting centuries of life. Which, frankly, is much more interesting. I’ve always loved mythology, strange creatures, and the idea that there might be bits of magic hiding just out of sight in…

Myth Bringer, the final book in the Mythical Menagerie series, is finally here! If you’ve been wondering ever since the day Ambrose discovered the hidden Repository – and the creatures locked inside it – what would happen to them, the time has finally come. I used to think mythical creatures needed protecting. Turns out, the…