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Grafitti in a building in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent, that I surveyed today

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I thought this was quite impressive - and rewarded me for taking a decent camera with me for once!

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Biggles Flies...in the face of realism

(or the perils of trying to write about what combat flying in WW1 was REALLY like) Like many men of my age (no, I'm NOT going to say what that is), as a boy I read Biggles. I know I'm not alone in the fact that my interest in aviation in general and WW1 aviation in particular comes from reading Captain WE John's stirring stories of derring do from the age of about six onward. It seemed to real, so vital, so exciting. Biggles has got a lot to answer for! As I got older and read in more depth on the subject it became apparent that things in WW1 were very different. Yes, compared to the squalid nightmare that was trench warfare on the Western Front, the war in the air was glamorous, the pilots - particularly the Aces - were the knights of the air. But, that's only comparative; for far too many life for the aircrew was short, brutal, very uncomfortable and incredibly stressful. The aircraft were often unreliable, some were structurally unsound. Early ones could bare

The Narrow Margin

or, writing good fiction about WW1 aviation without falling into the boy's-own-adventure/troubled pilot cliches Unless you're an aviation buff or a movie fan you may not get the reference in the title. It's to the book the film The Battle of Britain was based on and refers to how close the margins between victory and defeat in the battle was. It is also a useful analogy for what the movie tried to do; tread the line between entertainment and historical accuracy. It's also a useful starting point for this blog. I write literary fiction. But I also write about aviation in WW1. To some that's an oxymoron. Although the world has accepted some WW1 books as literary - Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong and Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, for example, as well as the classic Remarque All Quiet on the western Front - so far, aviation related books have failed to make a breakthrough. It's fairly easy to see why. Most falls into a few categories; 1.

Discovering the cost and benefits of my way of writing.

I always write my novels - and, indeed, often short stories - in the same way. I hand write the first draft in the good, old-fashioned way. The photo heading up this blog post is my current WIP, Three Brothers , the first of a trilogy covering the lives of my central characters from 1910 to 1940. I work this way because I've found that it works best for my style of writing. Primarily, I find that I think better if I have the organic connection between pen and paper. The slow, physical development of the story allows me to plot more intricately and develop the story and characters properly. There is a second, connected, reason why this is important. If you look at the photo you will see very few crossings out, no big blocks being removed (and this is a genuine and pretty typical first draft for me) and there's a good reason for that. It's not that I'm that good it's because of the fact it hurts so much to have to cross something out and go back, or rest

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