Fi Phillips

I'm sure all writers pull from their own lives and experiences for at least a small part of their writing content, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes knowingly and in precise detail. Using what we know can ground our writing and add believability (apologies if that isn't a real world but it sounded right). This month's exercise is to look into your own experiences and memories to find something unusual, or bizarre, an event or detail that was out of the ordinary, and embroider that memory or detail into a piece of writing. My own memory happened on a winter's night on a railway bridge. My car skidded on black ice and piled into a lamp-post, thankfully preventing us from tumbling off the bridge onto the train line below. My then boyfriend was belted in but the force of the collision smacked him into the windscreen. I remember him screaming and then silence. Almost immediately, he went into shock. The passing drivers all pulled over and helped. One drove to the loca...

This entrance is close to where I live. My family and I traipse through it a couple of times each month. That's as much information as I'm going to give you. What do you think it is? Prison? Castle? Barn? Garden gate? What does it inspire you to write?

August has crept up on me. Who am I kidding? August has grabbed me by the heels and dashed me through the past ten days in a whirl of family trips and events. It's always this way during the school summer break, finding ways to keep my kids (now teen and pre teen) amused and fed, and throw in my normal routine too. I wrote about this back in 2009 when I called it the August Monster . With the first draft of my second novel completed (last month's target), I decided to take a step back from it all before I went any further. My muse, however, had a different plan. Cue several nights of tossing and turning and making notes on my mobile phone whenever ideas dived into my head. I had always planned to write the Steve Haven books as a trilogy but the more I threw around the events that had to happen in the story, the more I realised that a series of books would suit much better, allowing me to tell the whole story rather than rushing through the bare bones. The August target ...