29 January 2018

Although readers of my stories will recognise many familiar memes and features in Out of the Desert Sands, this is a very different story because it touches on sensitive issues that are still [deservedly] alive today. At one level, the background of the story is well documented and well known. Princess Noor [loosely based on…

3 February 2017

I’ve finished my latest story – at almost 70 000 words it’s the longest piece of writing I’ve completed in the genre. The text is being edited for me by a good friend and I hope to have it up on the website in a week or so. The working title through its long gestation…

7 August 2016

I’ve just posed my latest work to my website. It’s called It Happened on the High Seas and it represents a return on my part to a simpler style. My little heroines are teenagers again and the story is set this year on a cruise my family enjoyed through the Eastern Mediterranean. It’s still a…

13 March 2016

  It’s been a dry time for my writing lately; I feel myself between stories, hoping that inspiration will come hurtling down from above to possess me.  Alas, I think that rarely happens with real writers, although one can read about Oscar Wilde completing The Importance of Being Earnest is a fortnight and other great…

14 January 2016

I guess it happens to real writers: that when they finish something that has been demanding and absorbing they feel bereft enough to find the challenge of writing too much to confront.  That’s how I’ve been for six or eight weeks. I finished the Christmas at St Mary Mead story and should have jumped straight…

16 November 2015

  For two very happy years, I was the librarian in a new Queensland State High School. This was long ago: the twelve year olds who came to the school in that first year are now celebrating their fiftieth birthdays.  Being the librarian was just an additional responsibility: I was still in the classroom and…

16 November 2015

Showing and Telling: The Classic Conundrum Buggered if I can get it right! I know all the theory but when it comes to the mix of show and tell in writing narrative, I struggle to hold to the simple philosophy of showing the reader a character or theme rather than telling them what to notice,…

8 July 2015

A New Story is Taking Shape I’m just about to begin writing a new story. It will follow immediately on from the Sherlock Holmes story set in Shanghai. The War has finished and England is back in the broken peace that followed the November Armistice. You can read this story at paulbland.com.au. My original idea…