Improbable Press Blog — Narrelle M Harris

By Narrelle M Harris So many people expound so many rules about writing – and so much of it can be contradictory – that it’s not always easy to tell good advice from bad. Two reminders of this came my way recently. The first was a Facebook post by a writer I follow. Full of irritation at absolutist ‘rules’, he reeled out the ‘common wisdom’ writing advice, full of ‘never do this’ and ‘don’t do that’. The comments were full of people citing beloved works which broke those rules with enormous success. The second was when I read Daphne Du...

By Narrelle M Harris When you’re writing canon-era Sherlock Holmes stories, it’s not enough to read Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories from start to finish. Although that is something I definitely did before (and during) the writing of The Adventure of the Colonial Boy, it didn’t always tell me important things like… what was Victorian era underwear like for men in the 1890s? I was writing a Holmes/Watson romance, and although I didn’t intend to be super explicit, I fully expected we’d be getting these gentlemen out of their underthings at some point.Obviously, it was vital to know what those underthings...