My volume of short stories, A Waltz through the Dark Wood , will be published in August 2023. To mark this occasion I thought I would tempt readers with a brief description. The Girl A forty-something, angst ridden screenwriter meets his much younger girlfriend at a cafe, and hears a startling revelation. The Lover A married businesswoman meets a charming…
Tag: fiction
California, 1939. A young couple sail off the coast on board the yacht Indigo. We don’t know much about them, but soon realise things aren’t quite as they seem. The yacht isn’t theirs. Something’s happened to the previous owners, but even this isn’t clear. There’s a sinister element at play, an undercurrent that drives the couple away from their troubled…
‘What happens when everything you have is not enough?’ I first penned The Butterfly Collector in 2007 in a couple of hardback notebooks. It started, as most of my novels do, with a single idea – in this case, a couple meeting for the first time in the kitchen at a party. Peter Calliet is a property developer who has all…
Novelists often complain that reading their earlier work leaves them with a distinct feeling of unease. The passage of time between one piece of work and another inevitably leads the author to a different place – greater maturity and depth of insight, perhaps, or simply an earnest desire to improve upon his previous attempt. Writing a novel requires a considerable…
I’ve often wondered where my fascination with the darker side of life comes from. My writing tends to reflect this taste and leads me into areas other writers might choose to leave alone. Although I’ve drawn on autobiographical material in the past, the old advice to write about what you know has never really appealed to me. As a writer,…
Novelists can usually be divided into two camps: those that enjoy research, and those that loathe it. I belong to the former, and spend hours trawling through books and articles for subject-related matter. But how much detail should end up in a novel is open to debate. Too much and you risk the reader’s irritation. Yes, some readers enjoy textbook…
Some time ago, I wrote a screenplay based on a real life murder case that had captured my imagination. I told a few friends who were also taken with the idea and, soon, a small buzz had been created without me really doing anything. One thing led to another and, through a contact of mine, I was invited to attend…
The Words of Wisdom Interview – a series of interviews with writers and artists, to discover their methods, dreams and inspiration.
No.5 – Dan Pollock
Dan Pollock was born in New York City to a family of writers and grew up in Laguna Beach, California. A former syndicate editor with the Los Angeles Times, Dan is the author of four thriller novels in addition to Maroc-Lair of the Fox, Duel of Assassins, Orinoco and The Running Boy – and a specially commissioned “logistics” thriller, Precipice. I am delighted that Dan took time out of his busy schedule to give this interview.