Diving with sharks and mantas…

The Nadia Laksheva series contains a lot of diving, and as they say, write what you know… I’ve just been diving with sharks and mantas in Socorro Islands, off the western coast of Mexican Baja. These are remote uninhabited islands in the Pacific Ocean, famed for sightings of many large ocean-going fish (called pelagics), including sharks and giant mantas, as well as humpback whales and dolphins. 

 

On the menu in May were mainly sharks and mantas. For me, mantas are the most graceful creatures on the planet, and we had a LOT of contact time with them while diving, especially at a location called the Boiler.…

Thank you book bloggers :-)

I’ve now appeared in at least 5  book bloggers favourite books for 2017, one just in had both 66 Metres and 37 Hours in the top 5, which is rare to see. I just wanted to say a huge THANK YOU to all the book bloggers who have reviewed my books over the past year. Before last year I didn’t really know anything about book blogging, and now I think they are a fantastic service for authors, especially as they mostly review books for free and often include candid and critical feedback for authors.…

On fight scenes…

Are you ever reading a thriller, and in a key scene there is a fight, but you get confused: the hero or villain seems to have three arms, or is facing one way then suddenly another, or else you just can’t visualise what is going on, and you really want to…?

Me too…

It’s not easy writing fight scenes – they work great on the silver screen, but in a book it’s hard for three main reasons. First, most writers have probably never been in a real fight, and being in a fight is completely different from watching one.…