Folklore Is Up for Grabs, and It Always Has Been
Folklore is made, remade, transferred and adopted, and the people who carry it forward are not troubled by the question of whether they found it or made it. The chough legend at Tintagel, three Edvane Stories, and the case for writing folklore the way folklore has always been written.
Read →How to Let an Object Tell Its Own Story
The object as narrator removes the consolation of perspective. It remembers everything and mourns nothing. What the technique makes possible, how it differs from destined objects in fantasy, and how The Yellowstone Ring puts it into practice.
Read →What Is Dark Folklore?
Dark folklore is not a genre. It is older than genre and considerably less interested in your comfort. What dark folklore is, how the knowledge in it precedes the narrative, and what it asks of a writer who finds it in the material.
Read →What Is Folk Horror? A Guide to the Genre's Oldest Fears
Folk horror is about what the land remembers, what the community conceals, and what happens when something very old is woken at the wrong time. A guide to the genre through three stories and its literary tradition.
Read →How Forty Stories Solved the Problem I Could Not Solve in the Novel
The Shivering Vale needed readers to know a world before they opened it. Forty standalone stories of Tales from the Woldwood carry the lore the novel cannot stop to deliver. Three examples show three different kinds of work the stories do beneath their surface.
Read →How a City Built From Four Songs Became a World
Streindarke began as a one-story setting for a Bauhaus song and refused to stay used. What four gothic dystopia tales, each grown from a different song, reveal about treating music as a seed rather than a script.
Read →How to Write Dark Folklore Without Protecting the Reader
Dark folklore keeps the danger that older traditions understood. What my story, The Broomfield Witch, reveals about writing witches who refuse to be victims, folk horror's domestic territory, and narrators who tell the truth and lie with it at the same time.
Read →What Is Dark Fantasy? A Guide to the Genre of Cursed Kingdoms, Haunted Woods and Broken Heroes
Dark fantasy is fantasy where the wonder carries a shadow. A working definition of the genre, how it stands apart from horror, grimdark and gothic fantasy, and where a new reader might begin. Drawn throughout from tales of the Marchlands, from a staff that mends at a terrible price to a room that keeps the dead who broke their promises.
Read →How to Use Folklore in Fantasy Without Copying Myths Whole
Folklore is not a stock cupboard of creatures. It is a way of thinking about the world. What my story, Bramlick the Brownie, shows about adapting old folk belief into living dark fantasy, and why a brownie is never just a small creature in a hat.
Read →Worldbuilding for Dark Fantasy: How to Make a Place Feel Old, Cruel and Real
A dark fantasy setting feels real when it has a job to do. It should not exist merely as scenery. It should have rules, habits, damage, duties and limits. What my story, The Farewell Chamber, reveals about places with purpose, memory and consequence.
Read →How to Write Dark Fantasy Without Just Adding Blood and Misery
Darkness in fiction is not a filter. It is a structural principle. The difference between a story that feels genuinely bleak and one that merely performs bleakness is not the quantity of misery on the page — it is the weight of consequence behind every choice.
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