Improbable Press Blog

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...

When I started writing I had a billion 'stupid' questions. The reason they were stupid is that I didn't ask most of them, so kept making mistakes (and still do). What does this have to do with why we're writing regular blog entries here at Improbable Press? Easy peasy, we want you to buy our books. And also… …we want to help you create, if we can. How can we do that? Got questions? Ask 'em. Want pep talks? Stand back once I start because whoa and damn I'm peppy. Like links and resources? We got those. Photos of naked...

Writing about a city you don’t live in can be challenging, especially when the characters you write about are very steeped in a particular metropolis, the way that Sherlock Holmes and John Watson are so associated with London. It’s challenging, too, when you might be writing of Holmes and Watson in the London of the 19th Century. London remains very much the sum of its history, but new layers are always being placed over the old, and some of its past was torn down and obliterated in various building booms over the centuries. The tricks of writing about London (past...