I started my writing career writing serials for a very famous fiction magazine in the UK called The People's Friend. This was where I learnt my trade with a wonderful editor called Sinclair Matheson, who taught me how to structure my stories and develop them into complete full length narratives that didn't lose pace, had believable characters the reader could invest in and came to a satisfying and enjoyable conclusion. It's funny to think that the magazine serial wasn't a twentieth century invention, but did indeed enjoy an immense amount of popularity in the nineteenth century, with some extremely illustrious authors honing their trade in much the same way as I did.

While I don't profess to having the same kind of talents as Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, George Elliott, Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, I do enjoy the fact that most of their famous novels started out as fiction serials in monthly publications. They were the equivalent of the soap opera in those days, believe it or not!

And now things are going full circle with the revival of the serialised novel. http://www.channillo.com offers a range of novels, journals, short stories and poetry published in weekly, bi-weekly, twice weekly instalments. To my mind this is a great idea! We all love a good TV series, and don't always have the time to sit and read at our leisure, so getting a book in short sharp bursts seems a great way to enjoy reading in our busy lives.

My new novel REEL TIME has jut gone live on the site, with Chapter One just waiting to be read. It is a YA time travel, murder mystery novel about two people who absolutely loathe each other finding themselves in the most peculiar and frightening of circumstances when they accidentally discover they can go back in time through a home cinema room in an elderly horror movie star's crumbling country house. This same movie star may or not have murdered someone at a party back in the 1950s, so our hero and heroine get the chance to go back in time and find out what really happened that fateful night - with a little romance thrown in for good measure, of course!