About a month ago I created an online newspaper using the paper.li website. It's called Women's Fiction  and is dedicated to books by and for women, which gives me quite a large brief. It has the web address of http://www.womens-fiction.net. My aim with the newspaper is to gather together some of the best articles on the subject.

A paper.li newspaper is effectively a pinterest board of articles, the reader gets the opening paragraph…

Stuck for ideas for your novel? Look to the past.

I'm a historian by training (I spent three years at Oxford University studying it) and by inclination. This means I see the world in a historical context and when I write I create a world in a historical context.

I am not, I repeat, not a writer of historical novels. Academic training can be a problem: I would spend all my time worrying about my accuracy, that's if I ever stopped researching the period I was writing in.…