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How to Get the Most From Your Writing Group

Before I began writing fiction, I was an academic living in a publish-or-perish world. I submitted articles to journals that accepted them, rejected them or (most often) asked me to revise and resubmi...

LGBT+ History through Contemporary Fiction

Minority rights aren’t only deeply important for minorities. Like the canary in the coal mine, they can also indicate a society’s flexibility, respect and overall health. Equality benefits everyone, s...

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Buying Books from Publishers: The Ultimate Guide

Over the last decade, buying books online has become commonplace thanks to big-name stores. And we’re not just talking about that online-only store, either. For any reader who’s trying not to default ...

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Cyberpunk Music: Explore The Sounds of Oshibana Complex

As much as individuality and the support of friends, (cyberpunk) music is one of the prime thematic focuses of Oshibana Complex. In a cyberpunk future where humanity is grown rather than born and clon...

Top 10 Common Character Tropes

Avid readers know how book can be an incredible form of escapism where almost anything is possible and you never quite know what’s going to happen next. This is especially true when we look at graphic...

Lockdown Reading

Books to console, inspire and escape into… With all but essential workers on lockdown, and our social lives on hold, the time seems ripe for a (lockdown) reading revolution. But this is no holid...

Fantasy Without Magic: Can it Work?

Magic and the fantasy fiction genre, they go together like Bert and Ernie – or should I say Frodo and Sam? Wherever you look in fantasy, you’ll see examples of magic. Lord of the Rings, of cours...

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How Can Authors Protect Their Mental Health?

When you first decide to be a writer, you might read books on how to write a blockbuster, you might work on your grammar and punctuation or you put hours of research into your favourite genre by readi...

Perspectives on Identity in Short Stories

by Anne Goodwin
November 17th, 2019
Diversity and InclusionGuides and Resources

I often get to the end of a novel and think Now I know where it’s going, I’d love to read it again. But, as a book blogger reading around 150 contemporary novels a year, I rarely do. But short stories...

Landscapes in Modern Myth

Landscapes have a tendency to set off questions in my head, about what lies below the surface of a place and what possibilities there might be. Can Fairy Tales Be Set in The Real World? I live in a be...

Does Diverse Reading Benefit Your Brain?

You’re probably familiar with the ethical arguments favouring diverse reading. Celebrating marginalised stories is part of what Inspired Quill is about. You might not be aware, however, that reading d...

The Point of Fictional Damsels

by Hugo Jackson
June 26th, 2018
Diversity and InclusionPublishing Industry

One of my favourite animated series was, and still is, The Mysterious Cities of Gold. It aired on the BBC in the very late eighties and it has always been a huge comfort and inspiration to me. There w...

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Literacy: Life and Death

by admin
May 29th, 2018
Publishing Industry

Literacy ought to be a topic of concern for any author, since – obviously – it goes straight to the heart of what we do, but even we don’t appreciate quite how much it has become a matter of lif...

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Welcome to 2018’s Accountability!

Picture it: A lone figure sits at a desk one weekend evening in December, peering at formulas on an excel spreadsheet through the new glasses they’d had to purchase two months before…

Reading the Wind

I Never Thought of Myself as a Writer I read fiction nonstop and even wrote some Tolkien fanfiction, but in my mind, that didn’t make me a writer; I also taught technical writing to college stud...

A Man Writing Heroines

by Sara-Jayne Slack
September 26th, 2017
Diversity and InclusionInspired Quill News

Here’s a story about D&D, listening and trying to be a good ally. Why am I, a man, writing about heroines? Let me tell you a story. A friend told me about a game of Dungeons & Dragons he...

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Stop Talking About Diversity In Books

by Sara-Jayne Slack
September 5th, 2017
Diversity and InclusionPublishing Industry

“The importance of diversity in books”, “diverse characters – tokenism or important?” and my personal favourite, “is diversity really that important?” Every time I see a convention panel discussion wi...

Victims, Villains and Vulnerability

Over a decade ago, the children’s charity Barnardo’s ran a controversial advertising campaign aiming to raise awareness of the damaging impact of being born in poverty. The Advertising Standards Autho...