"So would that be a glaive or a halberd?"

I'm told that as a young goblin (or piskie) in Cornwall I always had my head in a book. It's not exactly clear who I got this from, given that my family were generally too occupied with their market garden and other sundry tasks, while the other goblins were busy messing around on the beach or tombstoning off the pier. Since then I've always been accused of not being terribly well engaged with the real world.

So it was probably not a great surprise to those who know me that I ended up writing fantasy fiction. And not just the Hogwarts-style our-world-but-slightly-different thing, but full-blown 'high fantasy' alternative universe stuff. Magic, myth and mayhem. Wizards, witches and warlocks. Swords, sorcery and s... ok, enough of the alliteration. And no bearded dwarves or pointy-eared folk. That said, one shouldn't rule these things out.

That's the great thing about fantasy fiction. You write your own world. Anything goes. And it's not the real world. No contracts to draft, no reports to revise, no meetings to avoid. No rude officials, no drunk drivers, no corrupt politicians (or if they do appear, they get to drink molten gold fairly smartly).

So here we are, an unfeasible number of years later, with a short story and a novella on Amazon, and a novel, the Witch of the Fall (the first of many, I suspect) about to go up. It was inevitable, really.