LATEST POSTS #AMWRITING
The Future is Already Here
…it’s just (very) unevenly distributed. Certainly the entirety of ‘Any Human Power’ (and the Accidental Gods podcast which fed into it) is based on this premise: that there are countless brilliant, highly motivated people coming up with brilliant, workable ideas that can bridge us at least to the emergent edge of what Indy Johar calls ‘Inter-becoming’ where we are putting into action all the things we know are the best of ourselves, and what happens then is unknowable, but watching it happen will be one of the most exciting things imaginable.
Read More
Manda’s New Novel: Mapping the ways to a future we’d be proud to leave behind
Writing this new book…if I hadn’t spent nearly three years hosting the podcast and talking to people about exactly these ideas, I wouldn’t have had a clue where to start. Even so, the journey has taken me to places, and ways of being, I’d never encountered before.
Read More
A New Project for a New World
My new project for 2020 is a website, podcast and membership program. Here’s the full story…
Read More
The Year’s best Crime Fiction in the Financial Times
‘A Treachery of Spies’ is one of a great selection of FT Crime reads for 2018, including the latest from Ian Rankin, Jane Harper and C J Sansom.
Read More
Spies & Ciphers: the Poem Codes of the SOE
There was a point in 1942 when the expected lifespan of a radio operative with the SOE was six weeks. They had to have the presence of mind to get complex message encryption right while being cold, hungry and terrified of capture at any moment…
Read More
Sunday Times Thriller of the Month!
Thanks to John Dugdale for selecting ‘A Treachery of Spies’ as a Sunday Times Thriller of the Month August 2018!
Read More
Introducing Sophie Destivelle: assassin, spy and rebel woman
Introducing the character who I now love as much as any character I’ve ever created: perhaps more than any of them…
Read More
7 traits you’d need to be a successful agent of the SOE
Ever thought about whether you could have been an agent? Check out the seven essential traits that would have kept you alive in occupied France.
Read More
Digging into the guts: writing into the fire
It’s staringly obvious to anyone who takes more than about three minutes to read the facts of her life that the woman whom we know best as the Maid of Orléans was neither a peasant girl nor a visionary…
Read More
Joan of Arc: who was she, really?
The myth is of a mystic peasant girl, visited by angels and saints, who acted as a standard bearer and morale-booster for the French army to such good effect that they began to win. Here are 5 reasons why this isn’t reasonable, fair or borne out by the truth.
Read More
A Crime Writer’s Dream
Sometimes a character jumps out of nowhere: he or she wasn’t in the outline and didn’t have a key part in the plot – but they arrive and are so alive, so compelling that they take over every scene and muscle their way up to the top of the character tree…
Read More
Mithras and the older gods
It’s that time of year, what my friend John Barratt calls, ‘Mithrastide’: the time of consumerism and consumptionism where affluenza strikes the entire western world promulgated in the name of a child who was never born, in a place that didn’t exist, who grew to be a non-man who preached poverty and compassion and whose followers have spent the past two thousand years feeding instead the god behind the facade with a steady diet of blood, sweat and tears…
Read More
Short Story: What if Boudica had won?
BBC History Magazine has published a short story in which I’ve combined the survivors of the Boudica series with Pantera as he would have been if the Boudica’s armies had won…
Read More
Boudica: 15 years on
On the 11th of June 2015, it’ll be fifteen years since Dreaming the Eagle was first published. There were no electronic versions then, no Facebook, no Twitter. Email was on dial up, and we waited until midnight to dial in because the lines were engaged through the day.
Read MoreInto the Fire Prize Nomination
Writing is the best fun in the world. It’s an amazing honour and a privilege to be able to sit in my own home making stuff up and have people pay me for it. I do know this, and on the days when the ‘making stuff up’ feels like digging to China with raw fingernails, I remind myself.
Read More