I was honoured to be invited to the Fantasy Fiends Podcast for their 31st episode on the subject of ‘No Shortcuts!’.

(The dancing gladiators have no bearing on the podcast – except that they accurately describe the spirit of the event).

The podcast is hosted by Andy Peloquin And Stevie Collier, two talented fantasy authors. Every week they host another author, have a theme going, and usually a word-of-the-week. For that last bit Andy came up with amorphous, but I offered fascinate instead. That’s how we got side-tracked to flying phalluses. We also read an except from Murder In Absentia (doing voices!) which is how exploding eyeballs came up.

The main theme was ‘no shortcuts’, and we talked about the importance of research in building historical and fantasy novels – peppered with Roman names, Australian spiders, Asterix, and the obligatory fish-sauce – and how it all leads to immersive writing.

You can view the podcast on YouTube (below), or get it via iTunes and PodBean.