Beck’s Game: Now in Paperback!
29 November 2025Now available to buy – see links. Buy Here. Having issued Beck’s Game as an online adventure, for which it got over 33,000 downloads, the time has come to publish it as a real book, on paper and everything. “London is not just one place. There are stories and truths and lies all…
2024 In Reading
My reads, not the books that came out this year… It’s certainly true this year, 2024, had probably the least new activity from me. As a result of all this my blog has been quiet, I hope to improve on that in 2025. That doesn’t mean I stopped reading, and so below are four of…
Dune: It Stresses Me
Jumping On The Bandwagon With the release of Dune Part Two, I’ve decided to blog about how things Dune related tend to end up stressing me out; sometimes for literary reasons, sometimes my own stupid fault. A long, long time ago, the late nineties to be not that precise, I acquired a copy of Dune;…
Free Humanity! It’s Out Now!
30 January 2024 FREE on February 1st as a Kindle! Click here! Middlestead is just a quiet, suburban English town, but when some residents form a local science fiction group, they discover they can manipulate their neighbours in ways they never realised. Soon plans are in place and something is brewing that will lead to…
2023 In Reading
My reads, not the books that came out this year… Once again it’s time for me to look back at my year in reading and recommend four favourites. This year I actually made a spreadsheet to keep track of the books I had finished; I’m getting old you know, the memory is not what it…
Spending The Season in Europe
That Feeling When You Realise You Might Well Be A Character In A Novel And suddenly we’re in November and 2023 has, for the most part, passed by. It’s true I’ve written fewer blogs this year. In fact after a several solid years of writing, (2018 Framed of Rathgar, 2019 Indoldrum, 2020 – 2022 all…
Suspending the Disbelief
How Far Can We Go? Fiction is, by its very nature, made up. That means writers of stories have to convince their reader that whilst in their world what they are reading can have believably happened. This might seem easy, in theory, when dealing with the domestic; if the novel is about a couple who…
All Or Nothing
The Trials of a Completest. One of the frustrating things about many good writers is that they’ve written more than one book. Yes I know that’s an attention grabbing first line, but bear with me as I explain the problems it causes, at least to someone one like me. I’m a completest. All or nothing.…
That Blank Page
And One Hundred And One Ideas. I can be fairly confident in saying that the process of writing is unique to everyone who calls themselves a writer, I’m not talking about the technical side of things, but the personal, from that first pulse of a neuron to a paperback available for sale, and I know…
The North Way: Part Two
The One Time I Made Assumptions! In December I went to Norway, Tromsø to be exact, and in a frenzy of frozen excitement I launched the first part of two blogs about Norwegian literature. Half inspired by the fact I love Nordic places as a general rule so I am interested in their culture, hence…
80 Days When Fiction Became Fact
Definitely Not For The First Time A lot of what we accept as normal inventions or ideas first came from the mind of a writer. Many have been knowingly been turned into some sort of reality. It’s no coincidence that at the 1976 dedication ceremony for the Space Shuttle Enterprise the cast of Star Trek…
2022 In Reading
My reads, not the books that came out this year… It’s been a tradition of mine for a long time that at the end of the year I collect together every book I’ve read over the previous twelve months, just to see what they look like. This year I took a photograph!. Every year I…
The North Way: Part One
Begynner Viktoriansk Last week I was in Norway. Tromsø to be exact, (I do love that o with the line through it). Tromsø is at the very top of Norway, 217 miles above the Arctic Circle and the third largest settlement in the Arctic. If you’ve read Indoldrum (shameless plug for my novel) you’ll gather…
To Barcelona, As It Were
Catalonia From The Past In The Present Always one from a bit of exploration I decided that having never been to Andorra that I simply must visit. A few weeks ago the time had come and I disappeared off to the Iberian peninsular for the second time this year. To get to Andorra your options…
It Will Always Be Sherlock
From One Arthur To Another On my return to this fair isle, after having lived abroad for a while, I discovered the rather bizarre past time of visiting the final resting places of people who I have in some way admired. It’s a strange connection. I’ve blogged about finding where Agatha Christie is buried and…
So, How Was The Heatwave?
When Fiction Got There First Heat. It has been hot. I love it, or I would if it wasn’t a sign of the damage done to our planet. But the 40C we experienced in my part of England recently… I could happily bask in it; what is it they say about mad dogs and Englishmen?…
Summer Time Reading
I Wonder If Anyone Else Will Go To Portugal With The Same Selection As Me Last week I went to Portugal! I blogged about a previous trip I made to Albania and that was in January 2020, the last before travel became difficult; if I had only known… However Portugal was full of heat, sun,…
Welcome To The CITY Of Milton Keynes
It’s Finally Happened! I no longer live in Milton Keynes but woe betide anyone who mocks it in front of me. I grew up there, it’s one of two places I consider important to enough to call home, where I feel substantially I became me, the other is Dublin. (The only reason I can’t say…
To Be Young In The 1930/40s
How Much Have Things Changed? Over the grey of winter I decided to have ago at reading something uplifting, and then I spotted my copy of Angela’s Ashes in the To Be Read pile and felt it was now so long that I hadn’t got to this yet I’d better get cracking. Well it’s not…
Written From Experience
Everything Was Beautiful And Nothing Hurt. Wow in a blink of an eye it’s the end of April! Whilst the plan for this blog is to be about literature, as I am not qualified enough for anyone to be interested in my opinion on politics and the like, I think it’s not controversial to say…
2021 In Reading Part Two
My reads, not the books that came out this year… 2021 has been a very strange year. I don’t feel like I’ve done much with it, and yet it’s been my most successful year as a writer, I’ve been on podcasts, I’ve had a script for a radio play made and broadcast, my most successful…
2021 In Reading Part One
My reads, not the books that came out this year… Shockingly, alarmingly, it’s once again the time of year where I select some of the books I’ve read over the last twelve months and offer my favourites as suggestions. 2021 has been a bit of a mad year for me, I started the year feeling…
Reports Of Mark Twain
And The Things He Said And Wrote. The United States in the 1800s was a very different world from the one I am used to (late 20th early 21st Century western Europe); National Geographic tells me that slavery was abolished on December 18th 1865, but of course civil rights then became a deservedly big issue.…
Berlin Books
I So Need To Go Back There Soon! I’ve been to Berlin twice in my life, in reality, and it’s not enough. There is something about the German capital city that just clicks with me. You can describe most major cities with words such as “cool” and “confident”, it’s all a matter of opinion. In…
Agatha Christie: Part Two
Over A Century Of Love (Which When She Was All About Murder Seems Weird…) On the edge of a sleepy village in Oxfordshire, not too far from the River Thames’ meandering path towards London, lies St Mary’s Church; the graveyard overlooking the fields of the surrounding countryside. At the far end of the yard is…
Agatha Christie: Part One
Where To Begin? Generally there are three authors I turn to when in need. That is the need to read something but don’t know what as well as something not too heavy going: James Herriot, Gerald Durrell and Agatha Christie. Fortunately between the three of them they wrote a lot of books. The most prolific…
Foxing: Part Two
My Adventures With… When I started writing the blog about foxing it ended up being a lot longer than I’d anticipated so I decided to split it in two parts. You can find Part One here and it discusses how I’d noticed that some of my books, which I aim to keep in as pristine…
Foxing: Part One
My Adventures With… Those dark spots on the page or across the fore edge (the opposite to the book’s spine) might make the book looked aged and interesting, but I hate them. I like my books to remain as close to a pristine condition as I can possibly keep them, and for the most part…
Your Worlds
Authentic Tour Guides In various blogs I’ve extolled the works of authors who write about the very different worlds they grew up with. Both Patrick Kavanagh’s The Green Fool and Laurie Lee’s Cider With Rosie tell of almost idyllic rustic childhoods of yesteryear, in a world so different from our own. There is a fascinating…
The Kroagnon Effect
Everyone Should Read This, But No You Can’t See It… Writing is personal, whether consciously or subconsciously parts of yourself, your inner-self, will bleed into your work; which is one of the reasons I hide behind a nom de plume, sorry Trevor. But there is more to it than that. The amount of work that…
The Down Side
Putting The Misery Into Tragedy As my last blog was a bizarre shout at the planet to both slow down and get better I thought I would need to make the next one more upbeat… So I’m going to tell you about two of the most depressing books I’ve read. Be warned there are SPOILERS…
I’m Questioning How Much I’ve Achieved This Year… Is That Just Me?
Did January Actually Happen? What happened to January? It went so fast that I didn’t properly notice to write a blog complaining about it until the third of February. I find it hard to believe that I was listening to the manic fireworks set off near where I live over a month ago, yet I…
The History Of Rome
A Lot To Discover Personally speaking I’m glad I’m not a Roman, no offence is meant to modern natives of the Italian capital. Shockingly I’ve only been there once and I do need to visit again, and when I say I need to, it’s a burning desire that demands to be soon quenched (although of…
2020 In Reading Part Two
My reads, not the books that came out this year… This is the second of my look back at the books I’ve read in 2020. There were more then appears in these two blogs, some I’ve already written about, some I will do later, some I just read for fun. You can find Part One…
2020 In Reading Part One
My reads, not the books that came out this year… December last year I complied a blog about some of the books I’d read during 2019. I normally do look back over what I’d read over the previous twelve months at this time of year as it gives me a sense of achievement and so…
Watership Down, Rabbit Hunting (In A Good Way)
It’s A Real Place Over the summer I took a number of road trips throughout southern England and I used it as an opportunity to learn some more about my own country. It’s ridiculous I’ve been to some far and obscure places and yet some of the obvious ones on my doorstep I’d not visited.…
Recent Interview
With SmartCherry (Twitter @SmartCherrysTho ) Yesterday I had the pleasure of being interviewed by SmartCherry. You can find his YouTube channel here. These days I’m used to video chatting with people, as most of us are; it’s strange to watch it back though. I’m pleased to say, although I move about a bit and use…
How Not To Arrange A Bookshelf
I Don’t Think There Is One Easy Solution I recently moved homes and as I had been living in a smaller place a lot of my books had been stored in boxes. This to me was a great tragedy, but now I have the space to have most of my books proudly displayed on bookshelves.…
The Deep Ways Of Thinking
“I am no poet, I am no philosopher, I’m just trying to help you out.” A little late but the 2020 Nobel Prize for literature has been awarded… and I’d never heard of her… sorry. Having done a bit of research, however, I decided that I approved of the selection (don’t have a go at…
Entertaining Shakespeare: Part Two – Shakespeare Who?
I completely get why some may be put off, but here is why I think you should give it a go. Plague was filling the city and the country. Normal life was on hold. Theatres were closed. It’s been said many times that although we think that our circumstances are unusual, Shakespeare might disagree. It…
Entertaining Shakespeare: Part One – Not Boring
I completely get why some may be put off, but here is why I think you should give it a go. Every year I go and see at least one play by Shakespeare at the Globe. I love Shakespeare and have (in one form or another) seen all of his plays – lets not get…
Dystopian Battles
Orwell vs Huxley Dystopia is a whole category of fiction in itself, there are countless books creating dark and twisted societies based on authoritarian overlords and the such. If you were going to boil the whole genre down there are two books that, to my mind, define the whole concept. Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New…
Indoldrum – Out Now!
My new novel. My new novel Indoldrum is now out! After a long period of writing, redrafting, editing and proofing I realised I was at the point where I could unleash it on the world. It’s available on Amazon and for the weekend of 8th and 9th August 2020 the e-book will be free of…
Belize It, It’s Great
The literature of this Central American/ Caribbean nation. Belize isn’t a country that gets much attention. Bordering the Caribbean to the east, Mexico to the north and Guatemala to the south and west, most people know little about this Central American country. This is a shame. A couple of years ago I lived there for…
The Satellite Blog
Expanding to music. I’ve really been enjoying have a literature based blog. I love books and the opportunity to share some of my favourites is something I’m having a great amount of fun with. I also love music. The whole music industry is much more expanded since things went online, there is so much more…
Three Men And A Whole Lot More
The often overlooked humourist. One of my favourite eras is the late Victorian/early Edwardian times. Just beginning to lose the tightly controlled Victorian veneer of stuffiness it still had a charm and a formality but was much more relaxed. I love the fashions and if I could afford to dress the way the men did…
Slow Reads
The gentle stories. Ever since the rise of McDonalds and their kin the word fast has become synonymous with lesser quality. I don’t always agree, and even when the “fast version” isn’t the luxury type there is still a place for it. A few years ago a winner of the Eurovision Song Contest got criticised…
Free PDF of Breaking The First Wall
A short play. I know, writing about Lockdown is a bit passé so my defence of the following is, I wrote this short play in late 2017; therefore I’m just showing off my weird skills of premonition. It depicted the way I saw society was going long before viruses sped up the process. People living…
Giving Away Too Much
The fear of spoiling. On my last post I spoke about how I prefer to know as little as possible about a book before I read it. This goes for most other things as well, TV programmes, plays and films for example. Whilst most people don’t want spoilers I’m probably at the far end of…
Avoiding Spoilers
Don’t tell me anything. Ironically there may be some spoilers in the following blog. Earlier this year I finally got round to reading Curtain by Agatha Christie. In general I love Christie’s books and with so many of them it took me a while to get round to Curtain. However there is something different about…
North Korea In Books
Some interesting reads. For a country that is said to be closed off from the rest of the world there is an awful lot of books and documentaries about North Korea. I guess the fact that as soon as you are told something is a secret we can’t help but want to know. I’ve read…
Scene From My Mind – Free This Weekend 2/3 May
Just trying to be helpful. Simply because I love writing, or should that be, because I mainly exist in a world of my own imagination’s making, I occasionally look up the Opportunities page of the BBC Writer’s Room website. Sometimes there is a call for short plays from various theatre groups. Generally these have to…
Modern Literary Zeitgeists
Books everyone seemed to be reading at the time. There always seem to be books about that everyone is reading at that moment. You used to see them held firmly open on buses and trains, I have a habit that if I’m sitting by someone who is reading something that I’ve not heard of but…
All Creatures In Print
Because animals cheer us up. Just a glance at Twitter and Facebook shows that a lot of people like animals. Videos, pictures, gifs about cats, dogs, goats and anything else prove that featuring fauna is always going to be popular. As we are all inside at the moment and as it’s spring, the time of…
Very Long Reads – Part Two: The Obvious Russian Ones
Something to do as we have more time. Growing up there were always two books joked about when anyone wanted to hyperbolise a long text; War And Peace and Crime And Punishment. I always liked the symmetry of the fact that for two books to have the same reputation they always had the same concepts…
Very Long Reads – Part One: Victor Hugo
Something to do as we have more time. If you ask Google how long the average novel is, you get so many different lengths and ideas you could make a book out of them. There does seem to be agreement that generally they are somewhere between 80,000-100,000 words. How that transfers to page count is…
Why Dublin?
The reasons for setting a novel in the city. As I state elsewhere I’m not Irish. However I have lived for many of my important years in Dublin. To me it’s the default city. I’ve lived in other places but the experiences I have had in the Irish capital are really what made me me.…
Children’s Literature
It’s not just for kids. Generally I’m not a great fan of watching the film/ TV series of a book I’ve read. I don’t like how they miss things out or change parts. I don’t like being told that a character looks nothing like I had them in my head. This hasn’t always been the…
The Tragedy Of Queen Alexia… Available To Read
In full on The Writers Club I love listening to Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics on BBC Radio 4. In the episode on Euripides she retells the play Medea and is amazing. Inspired by how miserable it is I decided to see if I could have a go at a short play based…
A Whole New Logic
It’s a universe in itself. Each book is a world, thought out and destined by the writer. The author has full control over the lives and the events of the character’s lives. Therefore a bookshelf is many universes sitting side by side. In some we recognise something close to our actual reality; a true story…
The Travel/ Reading Dilemma
Confusing cultures. One of the things I love about going on holiday is it gives me so much time away from normal life and I have so many more opportunities to read. Especially true is this if I’m flying. I have the bus to the airport, the long wait in departures (the OCD in me…
2019 In Reading Part Two
My reads, not the books that came out this year… This is the second part of my look back at some of the books I’ve read this year, including the end of the world as we know it and turn of last century Kenya. Again I’m trying not to give too much of the actual…
2019 In Reading Part One
My reads, not the books that came out this year… At the end of the year I tend to look back on the books I’ve read during that time and feel a nice sense of accomplishment. This year I’ve got through some ones that had been sitting in my reading pile for years – I…
And The Winner Is…
Thank you for this award. This week the laureates of the Nobel Prize For Literature 2018 and 2019 both received their awards. I’m not going to get into the controversy over one of them, instead I’m wondering how many writers have fantasied about winning it for themselves. The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded…
Thank You Terrance Dicks
Now my life is full of books. It’s a little bit late, sorry. I’ve had loads of stuff in my personal life to deal with (having Meniere’s is no fun). But I wanted to draw people’s attention to Terrance Dicks. Very sadly he passed away in August. He was one of the big influences that…
Is Rating A Novel A Good Idea?
What do the stars actually mean? These days we are asked to rate pretty much everything. From our transactions online and holiday accommodation to books we’ve read and music we listen to. The question is what purpose does this achieve? The answer, to influence others to also buy or not. I’m writing this now as…
Seeing The Past Through The Eyes Of Those Who Lived It
Whole New Worlds From The Memoirs Of History One of the wonders of reading is being taken in to a different world. I love history so love a book that can show me the past in a way I can feel what it must have been like to live there. How much better if the…
Seven For A Secret… Available To Read
If You Like Agatha Christie… There is no way I could or would compare myself to the brilliant Agatha Christie; but I can be inspired by her. I’ve read many of her novels and been to see The Mousetrap. I know who did it… but I shan’t tell. If you’ve not seen it, go and…
The Trials Of Setting Up A Blog!
Whilst I set this up there may be some random things appearing! Sorry for that. Oh that’s a picture I took from the top of Xunantunich (Sho-nan-toe-nitch) – a Maya temple in Belize – it’s there because I wanted a picture of something and this is the first blog and no one is reading it.
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Arthur Hofn - Literature 