Bryony Marsh's Blog

If you’re a fan of Chris Archer’s work (and, in fairness, who wouldn’t be?), it’s likely that you’re aware of ‘On the Run’, the 1990s tale being shared on TG Storytime.

Iffy AI artwork, I know, but it’s a freebie. An artist friend of mine once quoted £400 to do a book cover; I think that would be problematic for a freebie story.

This is the story of Michael Fordham, who bungles what ought to have been a simple bit of work as a drug mule, forcing him to disappear before he has to answer to ...

Have you heard? Writers like to get mail – and the things you write don’t have to be lengthy, coherent, or even polite! I’m answering questions of all kinds here… and here’s the second batch.

Have you ever written a sentence that felt like it came from something older than language?

No. Because that would be weird. Maybe even wyrd.

I did give dinosaurs a religion once, though.

If your story were whispered by a deep-sea creature, what would it leave out?

Let’s assum...

There’s this doohickey on Goodreads that invites readers to ask writers a question, but nobody ever asks me one. (Goodreads seems to be pretty much dead, to be honest, but we writers still hope to use it as a means of reaching out to our readers…)

Last night, I thought: if nobody’s asking questions there, why don’t I solicit questions elsewhere, and then answer them here, on Sugar and Spiiice? So, that’s the plan. Here’s the first batch.

If your protagonist were a fungus, what kin...

I do hope your dreams were quiet last night. Personally, I found the stars rather loud. Anyway, here’s the unthinkable thought that I’d like to share with you on this occasion. Just a snippet of dialogue:

“I am not real. But neither are most things you believe in. Shall we continue?”

From R’lyeh with… indecipherable feelings

The picture? I have wondered, for years, how non-Euclidean geometry might appear. I decided that to mortal minds, “an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it ...

There’s no sensible way to weave every dark, cosmic idea into a book, and in fact it’d be a very odd sort of book if you tried. I thought it might be fun to blog some of them instead, from time to time. So:

Time is rot, and fate is an illusion. What lies before us is not purpose but erosion, grinding and patient.

After that weirdness, perhaps you’ll be pleased to know that I’m working on a new project. No Lovecraftian tentacles, this time: I’ve managed to escape from Arkham for a whi...

Sometimes, the research that you do while putting together a book hands you a gift. You don’t have to take it and use it, not right away and perhaps not ever… but they’re certainly nice things to find, to file away for later.

In the course of writing ‘The Whispering Woods’, I can think of three serendipitous finds that stood out. The first arose because I’d decided that Tilly’s hometown would be Danvers. I’d chosen it while I was writing ‘The Color of Deception’, simply by picking it off the ...

Some readers have already met Gloria Shearer, a new secretary at Miskatonic University who we get to know in Book 3 of the Matilda Hale Stories, ‘The Whispering Woods‘…

Gloria Shearer

When Sylvia and I had finished our final English Literature class, we passed by our student pigeonholes to check for mail. In mine, I found a note:

Miss Matilda Hale,
Please come to the Main Office, School of Sciences, at 5PM.

It was unsigned. I didn’t like that: it was out of the ordinary and anything t...

Fellow author Liam Slade brought an article to my attention recently, and I have to admit that I was fascinated:

Ranking Every TG/TF Subgenre on Fictionmania by Bethany Karsten.

Twice, I tried to post a comment, but WordPress wasn’t being cooperative and on each occasion demanded my credentials and then lost my comment in the shuffle. Since doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is (a) a sign of madness, and/or (b) the most sought-after quality in a Russian gen...

For now, just a very quick message to say that Matilda Hale’s third adventure is now live, courtesy of Amazon.

Yours for £3.95, or equivalent.

Supernatural chaos from another dimension threatens our world, but Tilly’s on the case – and she’s taking some time to make sense of her love life, too. If it weren’t for demonic forces and ancient gods, it’d probably be a pretty nice summer!

Earlier this week, I drew a line under ‘The Whispering Woods’. Or, more precisely, I typed “-oOo-” which is shorthand for…

Thing is, though, Whispering Woods is a story about what happens when Tilly and her good friend Sylvia go on a vacation to the Pacific Northwest. What of the third musketeer? Their roommate, Ruth, hadn’t seen her family all year so I felt that she’d have to head south.

I always work on at least two stories at a time. It’s the only way to avoid a post-book slump, ...