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After over three years of writing, is now available. It's the first interactive book that I've published and features game play reminiscent of the Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy books from the 80s.

Here's the blurb:

Only the bravest children come back from the Munchfoot Mountains alive.

Will you fight, will you scheme or will you run away? There are over 100 decisions to make as you choose your own path through this bumper book of gruesome and terrify...

Twelve children kindly agreed to help test . Thanks to all the children who took part. Here are some examples of your feedback and my responses to your suggestions.

One girl, called Emily, commented: 'Some of the sentences were a bit long/wordy.'

Feedback from Emily

So I wrote a computer program that broke the book into sentences and then arranged them in order of length. This helped me to determine any that were unnecessarily wordy.

The longest sentence was:

'The sunse...

Ever since I started winter swimming, I've been desperate to swim in the snow. Unfortunately, we don't get much of it in the South West, so I've had to wait quite a few years

I thought I was in luck when it snowed three weeks ago, but by the time I got to the beach, the flakes had stopped falling and, since none settled, I couldn't really call the subsequent dip 'a snow swim'.

However, today we had a blizzard. So rather than not enough snow, there was too much to even see the sea from the top o...

Recently I found myself using the police crime statistics website, a tool that lets you find out the frequency and flavour of crime in a given postcode. I joked that a more useful tool would be to plot ghosts in the area. One of the motos I live by is "If you can't find what you want on the internet, create it", so I did.

The ironic website, allows you to enter a postcode or street address, and then estimates the probability that it is haunted.

You can also add gh...

I have one project that's more successful than all my books put together, and I arrived at it entirely by accident. It's called Song Lyrics Generator and it's basically just a bit of fun that I knocked up when I was at university, to amuse my friends, which then exploded.

Over the last few months, I've been collecting suggestions from people that use the site, and the one request that came up over and over again was for a poem generator.

I shied away from writing a poem generator for years, bec...

Jump straight to tool: .

I use Shutterstock a lot. It has a vast database of stock images available for licensing at reasonable prices. However, I found it very difficult to search my download history using their own website.

Whilst they have powerful search tools for their whole database, it's somewhat harder to search only images you've already purchased. It seems you have to click through every page of your download history individually, and scour each thumbnails with your...

One of my favourite things about being an author is designing characters, especially choosing their name. I usually scour the net looking for suitable names. So I decided to write a .

It suggests given names and family names. You can specify gender, birth year, popularity and background, as well as choosing initials and an option to only include alliterative names.

Because there are billions of different combinations, and because the generator uses lists of names from all over the...

There are many great Copic colour charts out there but all the ones I've found feature discrete boxes rather than areas to try out your blending groups. With the true beauty of Copic markers being the ability to blend them, it seems a shame to separate your colours when making your own chart.

I've knocked up a hand colour chart that you can print and use to try out your blending groups. One of the real advantages of this method is that you can easil...

now hosts . There is a wealth of brilliant knowledge across the internet, but it's scattered across blog and forums. It's time we pooled our resources to create the ultimate resource for independent publishers.

The wiki already contains articles on , and many more topics, but we're hoping it will grow to cover all the questions self-published and prospective-self-published authors might have.

There are one o...

It's hard to surpass a fantastic film like Groundhog Day, the classic time-loop comedy written by Harold Ramis and starring Bill Murray. Yet Matthew Warchus and Tim Minchin expertly pull it off with the extraordinary Groundhog Day the Musical.

I stumbled upon the show almost by accident, having never seen it advertised or even mentioned anywhere. I was looking for a show to bolt onto a planned London trip. The lazy marketing visuals reminiscent of pound shop flyers, frustrating website and rel...