How to write a novel

This is the first episode in a new series aimed at all fiction writers. Raven Dane is an award winning novelist and with host Jon Bickley they discuss where ideas come from and what to do with them when they arrive.Raven Dane is a UK based, award winning author of dark fantasy, horror, alternative history, science fiction, folk horror and steampunk novels. Her first books were the critically acclaimed Legacy of the Dark Kind series, Blood Tears, Blood Lament and Blood Alliance. These were followed by a High Fantasy spoof, The Unwise Woman of Fuggis Mire. (With zero influence from Sir Terry Pratchett. Raven's comedy comes from her love of Monty Python and Blackadder.)Her steampunk novels so far are Cyrus Darian and the Technomicron, winner of the prestigious Victorian Steampunk Society's Best Novel award in 2012 and the sequel Cyrus Darian and the Ghastly Horde. The third in the series, Cyrus Darian and The Wicked Wraith was published in July, 2019. All the Cyrus Darian books are now with Telos Publishing.Raven has had a great many short stories published, including one in a celebration of forty years of the British Fantasy Society and in international horror anthologies including Dean Drinkel's trilogy Tres Librorum Prohibitorum, Tales from the Lake 2 published by Crystal Lake and an anthology of woman horror writers, edited by Billie Sue Mosiman entitled Fright Mare...Women Write Horror.This anthology was in a shortlist of three for a Stoker award in 2017. Raven is a regular contributor to Phantasmagoria Magazine and to the Gruesome Grotesques anthologies edited by Trevor Kennedy. She was signed up by Telos to be the first author published in their new Moonrise imprint with her collection of macabre Victorian and Steampunk short stories, entitled Absinthe and Arsenic, published in autumn 2013. Death's Dark Wings, an alternative history/ supernatural novel set in 1066 was published by Telos in spring 2015.As an obsessive Dr Who fangirl since the very first episode, Raven was delighted to have collaborated on the script of a film released on DVD, The Daemons of Devil's End. She was excited to get an acting role in the film which stars Damaris Hayman. Raven also worked on the novelisation of the film.Raven has appeared on two lists of top women horror writers , published to celebrate February's Women in Horror Month, 2013.Raven's spooky novella, The Bane of Bailgate was published in August 2018, written as a tribute to the enthusiastic steampunk movement and the huge, four day celebration A Weekend at the Asylum in Old Lincoln. She has a well received novella set in a chaotic, dystopian distant future published in November 2019. House of Wrax is with Demain Publishing.An enthusiastic fan of Dave Jeffrey's work, including his bleak but brilliant A Quiet Apocalypse series , Raven was delighted and honoured to have a short story in his international anthology set in his world entitled A Silent Dystopia. Though not a crime writer, her story in a charity anthology, Criminal Pursuits, Crime Through Time, entitled The Way of All Flesh was longlisted for a short story award by the prestigious Crime Writers Association in 2022. . In 2024, Telos Publishing brought out her new folk horror novel, Drwg Stones set in the Atomic Age of the late 1940s/1950s and set in a small, British seaside village on the edge of the beautiful, wild fells of the Lake District. She has a new folk horror book coming out in November 2025, called Bailfire and Brimstone set in Scotland during the dark reign of James Ist. Raven also has a non genre, 'holiday read' novel to be published in 2025, And...Action! under a pseudonym. The novel is set in 2003 and set in the dramatic international build up of a fictional novel becoming adapted to a blockbuster feature film and based on her own experience working with film horses in the UK. She is currently working on a dark fantasy novel set in Cyrus Darian's alternative Victorian London, a prequel to her Legacy of the Dark Kind series, entitled Blood of Kings and will be working in collaboration with Dave Jeffrey to bring out another book in the AQA universe.All Raven's work including stories in anthologies are available on Amazon UK and USA