Improbable Press Blog

By Atlin Merrick "What’s your process?"What’s my……what?If anyone’s ever asked you this question, about how you go about writing, and then took a minute from their so-busy lives to tell you a ‘better’ way, may I kindly suggest you ignore the right royal hell out of them?Because if you’re getting words on the page, your process is aces.Me, I go to cafes. I’ve written hundreds of articles in cafes. I’ve written two books in cafes. When a cafe gets noisy with someone tap-tap-tapping at a glass with their spoon or a child is weeping as if their hair is on...

Happy 2017 from IP to all our readers! And we think it never hurts to start the new year with ideas of how to poison someone... Today's post is by guest blogger, Jane Canaway, a freelance writer from Melbourne, who visited The Alnwick Garden in Northumberland, UK, last year.  The original Alnwick garden dates from the 18th century. Canon Sherlock wouldn't have visited the poison garden, which wasn't established until 2005, but he would have been very familiar with the plants it contains. *** The Alnwick Poison Garden by Jane Canaway It’s all a bit Harry Potter, with the skull...

A Christmas story for our readers. Thank you all for your wonderful support during the year We hope you have all had a bright and happy holiday, whatever your faith or philosophy. Story rating: Mature/NSFW This story is set in 1894, after the end of The Adventure of the Colonial Boy. ** December 24th 1894 was not Holmes and Watson’s first Christmas together, except for the many ways in which it was. They had of course celebrated the season many times since that first year. 1881. A friendship begun through necessity in a cold January was forged, through strange adventures,...

I sometimes conduct writing workshops. One of the most interesting and blush-inducing is the one I give about writing sex and intimacy. Sex and intimacy arent the same things, of course. You can have sex that's not very intimate and you can have non-sexual intimacy that's full of sensuality, and/or filled with affection and platonic love. Sex scenes for character and plot development The role of sex and intimacy in storytelling alters depending on the type of book and purpose of the scene, too.  Scenes of emotional and physical intimacy appear in all kinds of fiction, not just in romance...

This 1996 article is being reposted with kind permission from the author, Dr Craig Hilton, who creates cartoons under the name of Jenner. Dr Hilton first delivered this text as a presentation for the Sherlock Holmes Society of Western Australia on the 25th May, 1996. You can see Jenner's work at Doc Rat. When I was researching The Adventure of the Colonial Boy, I remembered this essay and it was one of my first ports of call for looking at Watson's medical history and 19th Century knowledge for the story. I extrapolated considerably, and also assumed that John was downplaying...