If you haven’t come across this before, the idea is that there are basically two types of writers. Planners, or Architects, plan out the whole story before they start, or at least very early on in the process. Pantsers, or Gardeners, start writing and see what happens. This is a gross over-simplification of course, and there is nothing stopping Planners from doing some free writing or starting with an idea and planning later, and there is nothing stopping from Pantsers from doing an outline or having a plan for where they intend their story to go. But as a description of a general tendency among writers towards one of two writing styles, it mostly works.

Neither method is correct and neither is wrong, and there are pros and cons to both. The biggest advantage of Planning is, of course, that you know where your story is going and can write accordingly, and you may need fewer drafts. But the disadvantages are that it can be more difficult to create really compelling, three-dimensional characters when you need your characters to take specific actions in order for your plot to work, and if you can’t quite get your plan to work, you may find yourself completely stuck.

The biggest advantage of the Pantser method is the ability to find the story as you go, to discover who your characters are as you write, and to let your story go to unexpected places and develop in a way that feels natural, where every action has a consequence and is securely rooted in character. The biggest disadvantage, as fans of self-proclaimed Gardener George RR Martin are well aware, is that you run an even higher risk of getting completely stuck than the Planners, for a different reason. Your story might just peter out, or you might find you’ve written yourself into a hole you don’t know how to get out of.

You can write using either method in any genre, but there are some particular advantages to one over the other in some genres. The world-building that is such a big part of epic fantasy can really benefit from a Gardener approach, as evidenced not just by Martin but also by JRR Tolkien. Tolkien planned and outlined, but his primary method was more a guided form of discovery writing, and of course as fans will remember, The Lord of the Rings became the epic we know rather than a short children’s book because “the tale grew in the telling.”

Mystery novels, on the other hand, can benefit from more of a Planned approach. There are mystery writers who can do it with a more Gardener style; notoriously, Ian Rankin doesn’t always know whodunnit when he starts to write. But most mystery authors will plan out their novel beforehand so that they know whodunnit and why and how, and can write to that conclusion. Agatha Christie, for example, was very strict about planning all her novels carefully in advance.

Part of the reason I’m putting so much focus on Planning my novel is because it is also a mystery - a supernatural mystery, to be precise, but still a mystery. It is essentially made up of three connected stories - the story of something that happened that led several people to be very angry at someone in the late 1920s, the story of the murder of that someone in the mid-1930s, and the story of a modern woman haunted (literally - no metaphors here, I like my ghosts properly spooky and definitely real!) by the events of that night and determined to solve the murder. I certainly need to know whodunnit, why, and how before I start to write, which is the core of the second story, but I also want to know the first and third stories as well. In fact, I plan to write them in chronological order, getting the whole of the backstory sorted first, and then seeing how the events it leads to unfold.

There are also practical reasons for favouring the Planner method when you’re trying to write alongside two or three other jobs and parent a small child too. Ideally, I would give myself several weeks to just write, and maybe feed myself and walk the dog, but I don’t have that option. I need to get better at “writing in the cracks,” as Bethany Atazadeh puts it, and be able to make some real progress in a short burst of time. The most effective way to do that is to have a plan I can follow. My plans are fairly loose and generally just outline the main plot beats I need to follow and maybe some sense of chapters, but there are some authors, like Gillian McAllister, who work with much more detailed outlines that are split into individual scenes, and this can be a lifeline when time for writing is short and chopped up into little bits.

And then there’s the simple fact that which style you prefer is ultimately just a question of personality and experience. Although I enjoy just starting writing, I tend to find myself stopping pretty quickly because although I can do some lovely description and world-building that way, I have no idea what the story is. Stories don’t tend to come to me the way they do some writers, and I rarely find my characters doing things I don’t expect, as others do. Most of my writing so far has been adaptations of pre-existing stories, which I often find more inspiring than trying to come up with a new plot myself. My novel is an original story, but heavily inspired by Agatha Christie - that middle story is designed to be a little Agatha Christie-homage, with the first and third stories revolving around it. I’ve also spent years training as an historian and learning to plan essays, articles, books, and theses, so planning chapters and outlining the main points in advance comes naturally to me.

I’m really excited to finally get stuck into this novel! May was a very busy month, with three live events where I was selling and signing my books; two book fairs and a local summer fête. They all went well and I met lots of lovely readers at all three of them! In June, although I have a lot on in terms of family events and personal things, I have a month off from in-person book events, so that’s a bit of time to try to get my head down and get some more writing done.

I have four more live events lined up for this year:

• 12th July I’ll be at the Coventry Festival of Books at National Trust Charterhouse

• 8th August I’ll be at Geek Mart at the Uffculme Centre, Birmingham

• 18th October I’ll be at the Halloween Craft Fair at Himley Hall

• 21st November I’ll be at the Coventry Book Extravaganza at Albany Theatre

Come and say hi if you’re around for any of these events!

Personal curriculum update:

Thread 1: Classic Gothic Literature

I’ve started reading The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and I’m really enjoying it so far, even though it’s a bit weird knowing exactly what’s going on when the revelation of the connection between Jekyll and Hyde is supposed to be a mystery and a surprise. But I’ve read and enjoyed Murder on the Orient Express and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (both Christie) while knowing the solution to both of those, so I still expect to enjoy it!

Thread 2: General History and Folklore

My current non-fiction reading is more current affairs than history, but it’s a related topic - I picked up How to Kill a Language by Sophia Smith Galer after seeing her talk about it on Instagram, and it’s fascinating so far.

Thread 3: Popsugar Reading Challenge

I’ve finally made some proper progress - I got to the end of Revenant! I found it dragged a bit as it went on, possibly because Worf turned up. Dax and Worf have never been my favourite couple, and the way they were written in this book didn’t really feel like them, it was too sweet and soppy - Dax had more chemistry with Kira in this story to be honest. And it all went a bit OTT towards the end. But it was still a good book, and I did enjoy the spooky/creepy elements.

The next prompt is “a book with an overweight main character whose story isn't about losing weight,” and I was going to re-read Terry Pratchett’s Carpe Jugulum for this one, as it fits nicely. But I found I was really in the mood for something I haven’t read before, and I picked up Recipes for an Unexpected Afterlife, by Deston J. Munden, late last year and have been wanting to read it. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure if there’s an overweight character in it, because unless a book is marketed on that basis, you don’t really know that until you read the book. But the main character is a ogre so I’m just sort of hoping there’s someone at least large, if not technically overweight, in the book. Honestly, I’m gonna count it anyway!

Popsugar Reading Challenge 2026 progress:

1. The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim (A book where gardening or a garden is central to the plot)

2. Sunrise on the Reaping, by Suzanne Collins (A book that features a platonic friendship between a man and woman)

3. The Book That Wouldn’t Burn, by Mark Lawrence (A book you meant to read in 2025)

4. Z for Zachariah, by Robert C. O’Brien (A book that starts with the letter “Z”)

5. Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Revenant, by Alex White (A book about women astronauts)

Buy my books!

Support me on Patreon

I’ve written short stories based on several different cycles of myth and legend now, and I’ve often written more than one story about the same set of myths. A full six out of the ten short stories in Creepy Classics: Ghost Stories from Ancient Greece relate to the Trojan War! I’ve also adapted two stories from the Icelandic Laxdaela Saga and written a novella based on a section of Eyrbyggja Saga as well as adapting an Icelandic short story, and there are characters that cross over several of those. Whenever I come to write a story about a setting or characters I’ve dealt with before, I always try to make sure the characterisation of each is consistent with the way I’ve written them in previous stories, so that if anyone is reading all my stories, they will be all clearly be set in the same universe, as it were.

But I haven’t come across any really thorny problems in those cases. The Icelandic sagas are dramatised stories about Iceland’s history, so although they are not especially reliable as historical sources, and are full of draugrs and trolls and revenants and so on, they are broadly speaking consistent in describing who lived when and how they were all related to each other. The Trojan War, a story told centuries after any real event that might have inspired it, is less consistent and has a lot more different versions, but even that corpus of stories does have a basic cast of characters and general outline to the story that is mostly consistent across different versions. Where there are major differences (for example, Helen being in Egypt, not Troy, the whole time) these are usually explained away (Paris took a phantom image of Helen to Troy, and everyone thought it was really her).

Arthurian legend is something else all together. First of all, King Arthur is not a real person. If I had to pinpoint an historical individual and say “that’s the inspiration for King Arthur” I would suggest the Roman-descended Ambrosius Aurelianus, who led Romano-British tribes fighting the Saxons in the lead up to the Battle of Badon Hill in the late fifth century. But the legends of King Arthur incorporate Welsh myth and legend, later medieval French romance, and all sort of other bits of history and legend from across Britain, Ireland, and France, so there is no single individual who is the “real” King Arthur. The figure of King Arthur has come together from a whole bunch of disparate sources, and there was an enormous amount of variety in the stories told about him until Geoffrey of Monmouth produced a hugely influential biography in the 12th century. Even after Geoffrey, huge differences in the various characters’ family trees, their relationships to each other, their backgrounds, and their life stories continue to find their way into every version - for example Sir Lancelot, who is so closely associated with Arthurian legend now, first turns up in another 12th century work, the poetry of Chrétien de Troyes.

This all got even more complicated because of the particular form of historical fiction I’m writing at the moment! If I were writing a novel, a film, or a TV series based on Arthurian legend, I would have started with a blank piece of paper and created my own Arthurian world, just like an author creating a fantasy world. There are so many choices to make when starting a fresh take on Arthurian legend. There’s the setting - should it be a “realistic” early medieval setting with a Romano-British Arthur fighting Saxons? A more fantastical later medieval setting, with chivalric knights in armour and stone castles? How much magic should the story include? Should a watery tart lying around in a pond give Arthur a magic sword, or should magic be stripped out entirely? Or perhaps there’s a middle ground in a folklore inspired almost magical setting that leans heavily on Celtic religion and mythology?

(I honestly don’t know which one of those I would choose, actually!).

But I’m not doing that. I’m choosing individual stories and adapting them into short stories that stand alone, even when they are inter-connected. And I’m doing it by adapting specific sources - I’m choosing a specific medieval poem, or history, or saga, and adapting that specific text into something new. The trouble is, none of the authors of Arthurian poems or histories had much interest in aligning their work with anyone else in any way!

The main problem this has caused me so far was in Arthur’s family tree. For at least a few centuries the idea that Arthur is eventually killed by a younger knight called Mordred has been at least somewhat consistently an important part of the story. But Mordred is sometimes his nephew and sometimes his son, and in the version where he is Arthur’s son, this is often because Arthur unwittingly slept with his own sister.

I adapted the poem ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ first, and I didn’t want to get into the whole business of exactly how Arthur and Mordred were related (especially if incest was going to come into it) because it wasn’t relevant to that story. So, since the hero of the story is Mordred’s brother Gawain, I simply named Mordred as Gawain’s brother and another of Arthur’s nephews and left it at that. But then I came to write ‘Guinevere’s Tragedy,’ which is based on a poem called The Adventures of Arthur at the Tarn Wadeling. Despite the title, this poem also stars Sir Gawain, alongside Guinevere, but here Mordred and his eventual role in Arthur’s downfall is more important to the story. It could still work if Mordred was Arthur’s nephew, but it would be less poignant.

For now, my solution has been that the ghost of Guinevere’s mother knows the truth but Guinevere and Gawain do not - so Mordred is both Arthur’s nephew and his son (which is true if he was born of incest anyway!). But it made me realise that I need to be a lot more careful when I’m adapting Arthurian legend, and think about the whole world I’m creating, not just the individual text I’m adapting. My Arthurian kingdom has ended up in a rather fantastical pseudo-high-medieval world, neither historically accurate early medieval, nor quite later medieval either, but leaning more towards the latter. It is a world of ghosts and enchanted knights, but what about Merlin? (He hasn’t come up yet!). Are there Druids in this world, or witches? What is Arthur himself like? He’s a bit of a boor in ‘Guinevere’s Tragedy,’ and fairly cut-throat in ‘Sir Gawain the Green Knight,’ but I haven’t really spent much time with him yet. I’ll have to find a ghost story that features Arthur himself more prominently, and find out!

If you’re interested in some of the earliest texts relating to King Arthur, I talked about them in my latest video on my Learn Irish and Welsh With Me YouTube channel, so do take a look at that!

Personal curriculum update:

Thread 1: Classic Gothic Literature

No movement here I’m afraid! The month of May includes a bank holiday (two, actually, but only one in the school term), an election that meant the school closed to be a polling station, a week of school half-term holiday, two book fairs and a local market, and my husband being away doing exams for half the month. I’m behind on everything!

Thread 2: General History and Folklore

See above! Even the Arthurian texts I talked about in the new Learn Welsh With Me video were pulled from research I did ages ago, first for my main YouTube channel, then for work (as in my day job as a History lecturer!).

Thread 3: Popsugar Reading Challenge

I have actually made a bit more progress here, even if I haven’t anything to add to the list yet. I’m really enjoying the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine tie-in novel Revenant, by Alex White. I picked it up because I was looking for a murder mystery set in the world of Star Trek, and I thought the title was probably a metaphor, what with it being science fiction rather than horror or fantasy. I’m delighted to discover that while the mechanics of the story are, of course, science fiction, that title is more than just a metaphor - I don’t want to spoil it, but the way the story unfolds, it really is a sort of body-horror-slash-ghost-story, within the bounds of the Star Trek universe. I’m loving it, it’s just perfectly matched to my tastes! And to top it off, the scenes on the planet Trill read in a way that weirdly reminds me of being on holiday in one of the countries of Mediterranean Europe, which is also great fun!

I’ll be selling my books at the Cirencester Book Extravaganza at Bingham Hall tomorrow (Saturday 16th May) and at the Bridgnorth Carnival on Sunday 24th May, so do pop by if you’re in the area!

Buy my books!

Support me on Patreon

Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/JulietteHarrisson

Buy my books! https://books2read.com/ap/nzeerp/Juliette-Harrisson

Buy merch! https://www.julietteharrisson.co.uk/store

Creepy Classics music written and performed by Ed Harrisson (C)

Sources

Translation by Anthony Maxwell: https://www.richardfordburley.com/sin-and-evil/files/Thorstein.pdf

https://www.hurstwic.org/history/articles/daily_living/text/Villages.htm

The Welsh Viking on Vikings and medieval toilets, on YouTube

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/viking-toilet-oldest-bathroom-denmark

https://www.vikinganswerlady.com/fire.shtml

Rowe, Elizabeth (March 28, 1998). “Cultural Paternity in the Flateyjarbók Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar” (PDF). Alvíssmál. Retrieved December 17, 2015

We’ve collectively been doing the Medieval period dirty for hundreds of years, starting with its name. The period of European history between the fall of the Western Roman Empire (476 CE, though in Britain we tend to take it from 410, when the Romans left the Britons to their own devices) and the Renaissance (dates vary depending where you are in Europe; let’s plump for Columbus’ voyage to America in 1492, though in Britain we usually go for the end of the Wars of the Roses in 1485) is called the Middle Ages because it was the period in between two other things. In Latin it was called the medium aevum, middle age, falling in between Classical Antiquity, the cultures of Ancient Greece and Rome that have been so much admired by later generations, and the Modern period. The Renaissance was considered a “re-birth” of ancient art, literature, philosophy, and to an extent technology; European historians now refer to the years of roughly 1500-1800 as the Early Modern Period, to separate the quite different worlds of the Tudors and the Victorians, but it’s all labelled “Modern.”

So the poor old Medieval period has been dismissed for centuries as the “middle bit” in between the greatness of Ancient Greece and Rome and the wonders of the modern world. This is a completely misleading mis-characterisation of 1000 years of history across the whole continent of Europe. There’s far more to the Medieval period than some kind of pause in between Ancient and Modern!

For starters, the Roman Empire in the East did not fall until 1453, when the Turks over-ran Constantinople. (My wonderful high school History teacher Mrs Tringham used to call this the end of History and the beginning of Current Affairs, and I’m inclined to agree with her!). Historians use the name “Byzantine Empire” for the Empire in this period for a few reasons. Culture, technology and lifestyles were all pretty different from the earliest days of Ancient Rome in 753 BCE by the fifteenth century CE, and using a different name for the later period helps to show that. Rome itself was only part of the Byzantine Empire for a short time, mostly in the sixth century; the new name comes from Byzantium, the city that became Constantinople under Constantine I and was the capital of the Eastern Empire. The Byzantine Empire was Greek-speaking, which had been the case in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire before as well, but Greek now became the official language of the whole Empire, and it was Greek Orthodox Christian, whereas the Western Empire was only Roman Catholic Christian for its last two centuries. So we use a different name to make it easier to study, but for the people living in it, it was still the Eastern Roman Empire, even if it didn’t technically include Rome!

In Western Europe, the period between about 476/410 and about 1000/1066 used to be called the Dark Ages, and when I was in primary school we were always told that this was because they were literally dark, and people had no candles or lamps and therefore could not read or write at night, and that as a result, they did not read and write much at all and left no texts. But this is both untrue, and unfair. First of all, the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings and other peoples of Western and Northern Europe did have candles, made from beeswax or tallow, they were just expensive. Second, they did read and write, it’s just that what has survived has mostly been in the form of inscriptions in non-Latin alphabets. They also prioritised oral tradition and oral histories, something that was looked down on in the past, but more recently historians have started to acknowledge that an oral culture is not lesser than a written one; it’s just a bit harder to study centuries later, for obvious reasons!

It is true that Western Europe experienced some changes we might think of as “decline” in the Early Medieval period - population numbers went down, and some Roman technologies were lost, like central heating systems. But for the most part, the communities and cultures of Western Europe in this period were fascinating, thriving peoples. Not being Roman (or Byzantine) does not make them lesser.

Then we get into the High Middle Ages and the Later Medieval period, and this is the period you’re probably picturing when I say “Medieval.” If your mental image of this period is of women in long dresses with huge sleeves and possibly a fancy hat, and a stone castle with a knight in armour riding around outside of it, then this is the bit you’re thinking of! This is the era of Robin Hood, and most King Arthur stories look and feel like they are set in this era, even though if Arthur were real he would have lived about 500 CE (when Aurelius Ambrosianus, a Roman-descended Briton, fought the Angles and Saxons at the Battle of Badon Hill).

Some of the stereotypes around this era have some truth to them. The feudal system was in place throughout a lot of Europe, a system of unfreedom that tied peasants to the land they worked on (we use the phrase “unfreedom” because in some places, like England, slavery was technically illegal and there are some differences between serfdom and slavery). While life for most people was not quite the unending stream of misery you might think if you’ve watched or read anything written by George R. R. Martin, it is true that the peasants of Europe did have to deal with the Black Death, the beginning of the Little Ice Age, being called up to fight their lords’ wars, and, in Western Europe, the numerous corrupt practices of the Medieval Catholic Church.

However, not everyone’s life throughout the whole 500-year-period was miserable or marked by war or plague or famine. This is also not the period of the infamous European witch trials, which for some reason are often misattributed to the Medieval era when they are actually an Early Modern phenomenon. There were occasional witch trials during the Medieval period but not an especially large number of them. The horrendous witch hunts of European history happened over a period of 2-3 centuries, in both Catholic and Protestant areas, in which victims were 80% women in most places but not all (victims in Iceland were 90% male), and they happened between about the 1450s/1500 and the early 1700s (depending on location - they went on quite a bit later in some Eastern areas). They are not Medieval.

Medieval art also get short shrift, being either criticised for not being as good as Renaissance art, or laughed at. And I’ll grant you, a lot of Medieval marginalia is objectively hilarious.

Medieval art is also known for having something of a flat style. But Medieval artists were more than capable of producing beautiful works of art, and personally I find some of the flattish, heavily stylised designs rather lovely.

In Creepy Classics: Medieval Ghost Stories, I’ve tried to capture some of the depth and breadth of the Medieval period. Inevitably, I couldn’t cover everything. All the stories in the book take place in Western Europe, because those are the histories, literatures and cultures I am most familiar with. But I have tried to take readers on a journey through this neglected millennium of European history, from Italy under the shadow of Ancient Rome, to Ireland in the age of Kings, to the far north in the Viking Age, and then to England, where we follow the ups and downs of the later Middle Ages through stories of Queens and serfs, outlaws and pilgrims.

The book launched at the Birmingham Book Extravaganza yesterday, which was a great event where I got to meet and chat with loads of lovely readers! I’ll be out signing and selling my wares again at the Book Extravaganza in Cirencester at Bingham Hall on Saturday 16th May, so do come and say hi if you’re in the area. And of course it’s available to buy online in paperback or e-book from all the usual places: Kobo (it’s also in Kobo Plus), Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Apple, Fable, etc. etc. etc.

Personal curriculum update:

Thread 1: Classic Gothic Literature

I finally finished Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray! I really enjoyed it, even if it did sag a tiny bit in the middle when Wilde described eighteen years in one chapter. But overall, it was great! Next up, I’m going to tackle The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which I’m not sure is really my thing, but on the plus side, it’s short!

Classic Gothic literature read so far in 2026:

1. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë

2. The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

Thread 2: General History and Folklore

I haven’t had time to do much general reading this month because I’ve been focused on getting the book out, but I did do a tiny bit of research on Beltane/Bealtaine for my new Irish and Welsh Learn With Me YouTube channel:

Thread 3: Popsugar Reading Challenge

I haven’t managed to do any more reading for this, what with everything else going on. I’ve decided I might read Revenant by Alex White, which is a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine tie-in murder mystery novel about Jadzia Dax, rather than Jeri Taylor’s Mosaic about Captain Janeway as “a book about women astronauts.” Mosaic is fine but it wasn’t really grabbing me. Now that the new book is out, I hope to get back into it again.

I have to apologise yet again for the podcast being late. This month’s story will be one of the stories from Creepy Classics: Medieval Ghost Stories, a really fun little yarn about a Viking being haunted by a demon in the toilet. So it’s all written, but I just haven’t had time to record and edit it yet. At this point I would just shift to doing episodes early in the month, if I didn’t need to get something out at the end of October every year for Halloween!

Buy my books!

Support me on Patreon

Classicists will tell you that ancient literature is brilliant and very much worth reading for pleasure and for its own sake as works of art, and they are right. The plays, poems, histories and biographies of the ancient world haven’t survived for 2,000 years or more by being boring. But what Classicists sometimes forget is that if you’ve never learned about the ancient world and you don’t know anything about ancient Greek and Roman history, literature and culture, there can be a barrier to entry here that can make these texts seem boring, difficult, or obtuse. This is because ancient authors absolutely loved what Classicists call intertextuality, and what the rest of us call pop culture references – and if you don’t know the pop culture, the reference doesn’t make any sense.

Take one of my favourite ancient Greek plays, Frogs by Aristophanes. This is an ancient comedy in which the god Dionysus goes to the underworld to retrieve the recently-deceased playwright Euripides, but ends up taking back Aeschylus instead. The chorus are all dressed up as the frogs that live in the River Styx on the border of the underworld, and the whole thing is a quirky send-up of the katabasis trope, an ancient story about a hero going to the underworld for various reasons, like the story of Orpheus trying to retrieve his wife Eurydice.

Some of the things that might make Frogs less appealing to modern readers are cultural issues that come up in lots of ancient texts. The casual acceptance, not just of slavery as an institution, but of the physical assault of slaves as a normal and everyday part of life is pretty unpleasant. Similarly, I would hope modern readers would not have an issue with Dionysus’ slave Xanthias asking if the god has developed a sudden passion for a man, but when a youth/boy is the next and equally acceptable option for the object of his affection, we might feel pretty horrified. Ancient literature is over-flowing with these sorts of outdated attitudes, and there is just no way of avoiding them if you want to read any Classical texts at all.

Then in the latter part of Frogs, the story turns to a competition between Euripides and Aeschylus over which one should be brought back to life. If you have in-depth knowledge of the plays of Aeschylus and Euripides, as well as of fifth-century Athenian politics and the Peloponnesian Wars, this will be funny and entertaining. If not, less so. There’s a musical based on it by Stephen Sondheim, which switches the dead writers to William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw, but even that requires knowledge of those two playwrights that not everyone likely has, in order to be really appreciated.

So does all of this mean we should just give up on appreciating Classical literature as literature entirely and read it only as a useful source for history? Of course not! There are some texts that provide better starting-points for readers who aren’t familiar with the Classical world. So here are my picks for a Classical Literature starter-pack. I’ve chosen texts that keep the more horrifying attitudes of the ancient world to as much of a minimum as possible (condoning slavery, sexism, and so on) – though do bear in mind you absolutely will not find any entirely unproblematic ancient texts – and that are available in a good modern English translation, and tell a compelling story without a reader needing multiple degrees in Classics and Ancient History to understand them.

1. Epic poetry: Homer, The Odyssey

I read both The Iliad and The Odyssey for my undergraduate dissertation, and they are two of the most accessible Classical texts, at least partly because they are the first! There are plenty of works of world literature that predate them, but they are the oldest texts in Greek or Latin and the beginnings of Western European literature. The Iliad has some incredibly dramatic and moving scenes, but it loses major points by having some sections that anyone reading for pleasure is going to want to skip over, the Catalogue of Ships being the chief offender (which is exactly what is sounds like).

The Odyssey, on the other hand, while not what many readers expect, as Odysseus’ adventures with the Cyclops, Circe the witch, the underworld and so on only occupy 9 Books (chapters) out of 24, is a compelling adventure from start to finish, and its hero Odysseus the trickster is one of the most fascinating characters in Greek mythology.

Translation: Emily Wilson has done a fairly recent translation that aims to modernise the language, albeit occasionally at the cost of a more literal translation of the Greek. For my undergraduate dissertation I read Robert Fagles’ verse translation, which is pretty good, if a bit old now. A. S. Kline has a good modern translation available for free at Poetry in Translation.

Advanced option: Virgil, The Aeneid – there are parts of the this poem that mean more if you know a bit of Roman history, and it’s not quite finished, but the first six Books especially are a fast-paced adventure.

Avoid: Ovid, Metamorphoses – I know I will get flak for this as loads of people love Ovid. But not only is Metamorphoses made up of a bunch of disconnected stories jumbled up together, I also find Ovid’s attitudes towards women, sexuality, and sexual activity too disturbing to want to read this for any reason other than as a useful source for ancient mythology.

2. Elegy and Lyric Poetry: Propertius, Poems

Propertius was one of a number of poets writing love poetry in Latin in the first century BCE and the first century CE. His poetry is pretty typical of the genre but much of it is very readable, and eventually you get to my absolute favourite poem, 4.7, which is a properly chilling ghost story in poetic form – and check out 4.8 for the background, in a Nolan-esque bit of time-twisting!

Translations: I picked up Guy Lee’s translation for Oxford World’s Classics while I was doing my MA, or A. S. Kline has done a good up to date translation of this one as well.

Advanced option: Catullus, Carmina – A little bit of knowledge of Roman Republican history helps here, as Catullus’ lover “Lesbia” (named for female Greek love poet Sappho’s home island) is widely thought to be a pseudonym for Clodia Pulchra, and Lesbia’s brother Lesbius is Clodia’s brother Clodius, a well-known figure in Roman politics. But Catullus came up with some great, romantic lines, as well as some pretty funny sections, and an unforgettable, if somewhat prejudiced, poem about a self-made eunuch priest of Cybele.

Avoid: Ovid, The Art of Love – Ovid again! This poem is all about how to pull other men’s wives. Ovid was basically a first century pickup artist. Bleurgh.

3. Tragedy: Sophocles, Antigone

Granted, it does help to know a bit of the other myths surrounding this story, but Antigone’s father was Oedipus and what happened to him is pretty well known! After Oedipus abandoned Thebes because of the whole marrying-his-mother thing, his sons (slash brothers, obvs) fought a war against each other in which both died, and their uncle Creon took over and had one brother buried properly but not the other. This play is about their sister Antigone’s fight to get the other brother a proper burial. It is tragic in every sense and encapsulates all the tensions that are the focus of a lot of Classical Athenian plays – tensions between loyalty to your state or your family, or loyalty to the laws of the gods or of men. But it’s also just a really good play with compelling characters, and draws on universal human feelings about love and family and death. There are some clips on YouTube from a National Theatre production starring Christopher Eccleston and Jodie Whittaker (yes, The Doctor vs The Doctor!) which are well worth a look to get a taste of it.

Translation: There’s a good, free, modern translation by George Theodoridis at his website Bacchic Stage.

Advanced option: Euripides, Medea – Although there’s a whole backstory here involving Jason and the Argonauts, you don’t really need to know it to read or watch and appreciate Medea. The title character’s speech about the challenges facing women in ancient Greece is a fantastic bit of apparently feminist writing – it’s just a shame she turns to infanticide straight afterwards…

Avoid: Aeschylus, Eumenides – I once took friends to see the second of Aeschylus’ three plays about Agamemnon and his family, Libation Bearers, live at the theatre. They were not impressed, as they felt there was far too much arguing and not enough murder. There is no murder at all in the third play, Eumenides, just a lot of talking and a conclusion sexist enough to rival that terrible final episode of Star Trek: The Original Series (IYKYK). Best avoided unless you’re a completist – though I did adapt the good bits into a short story for my Creepy Classics: Ghost Stories from Ancient Greece collection!

4. History and Biography: Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars

Suetonius is a right old gossip, whose access to actual primary documents from the imperial library was probably cut off halfway through the writing of his famous set of biographies, resulting in the Caesars’ Lives becoming more and more lurid and shocking as the text goes on. However, recent events have led me to re-evaluate Suetonius, and I am increasingly convinced that actually he wasn’t exaggerating or repeating crazy gossip at all, and all these people really were as awful and bonkers as he said they were. Either way, this collection is a very entertaining read.

Translation: Robert Graves, author of I, Claudius, did the classic Suetonius translation for Penguin back in the early 20^th century, but believe it or not A. S. Kline also has a translation of this text up at Poetry In Translation, despite it being neither poetry nor fiction!

Advanced option: Herodotus, Histories – this is where it all began, the text that gave us the word “history,” from the Greek historiē, investigation. Herodotus meanders quite a lot off of his ostensible subject of the Persian Wars, but that means we get an entire chapter on Ancient Egypt, a description of a phoenix, and a terrifying account of giant gold-digging ants who live in the desert, so it’s worth it.

Avoid: Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War – I’ll get in trouble for this one as well, as Thucydides is frequently admired for writing about events he was involved in and for *not* including phoenixes, giant ants, ghosts, or any of the other exciting things you find in Herodotus. Which is why I think he’s boring and I don’t like his history!

5. Comedy: Apuleius, Metamorphoses

This novel is sometimes titled The Golden Ass, to avoid confusion with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but since I vastly prefer Apuleius to Ovid, I’m going to let him keep his title. Based on a folktale about a man who turns into a donkey, this novel follows its hapless hero all around Roman-era Greece in his quest to find some roses to eat to turn himself back into a human after his messing around with a witch’s spell went wrong. Although of course there are problematic attitudes in here, towards the eunuch priests of Cybele for example, the novel expresses horror at especially poor treatment of slaves and includes some decently written female characters, which is not bad going. And it’s genuinely funny.

Translation: I originally read Robert Graves’ translation of this for Penguin as well, but yes, you’ve guessed it, A. S. Kline has a very good one over at Poetry In Translation.

Advanced option: Petronius, Satyricon – This novel has mostly survived in fragmentary sections, apart from one longish chapter about a truly terrible dinner party. When I first read it, I remember I was sitting in the back of my parents’ car, and I suddenly laughed out loud at a 2,000-year-old joke, which was honestly really cool. But it does help to have a bit of prior knowledge of Greco-Roman myth and culture to actually get some of the jokes.

Avoid: Aristophanes, Wasps – unless you are intimately familiar with how the 5^th-century Athenian court system worked, as well as the ins and outs of Classical Athenian politics, you’ll want to hold off on this comic play for a while.

6. Philosophy: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

So accessible it was once quoted in an episode of Doctor Who, the brilliant thing about this Stoic philosopher’s collection is that it’s a series of short thoughts that can be read in tiny little bite-size chunks, which is how I personally like to digest philosophy, I don’t know about you. The fact that Marcus Aurelius was also a Roman Emperor just makes the whole thing even more fascinating (and, sometimes, a bit hypocritical).

Advanced option: Plato, Symposium – this is essentially a bit of real-person fan fic in which a bunch of Plato’s friends, some of whom were dead by the time he wrote this, sit around and talk about Love. It’s famous for its rather lovely myth about why people are always looking for their “other half” and why for some people this is someone of their own gender, and for others someone of the opposite gender, but as well as some other, less enlightened, ideas about gender and sexuality, it does also benefit a bit from knowing who Aristophanes, Socrates, and Alcibiades are.

Avoid: Aristotle, On Dreams – in this text, Aristotle says that if a woman looks into a mirror while on her period, the mirror will turn a reddish colour (reflecting the blood). Apparently there was not a single woman available in all of Greece whom Aristotle could have asked to verify if this were true or not. Eyeroll.

So there you have it, a Classical Literature Starter Kit! I am still hard at work on Creepy Classics: Medieval Ghost Stories, so keep an eye out for updates on that, and do come along to the Birmingham Book Extravaganza on 2^nd May if you’re in the area (details at the link).

Personal curriculum update:

Thread 1: Classic Gothic Literature

I’m still working my way through The Picture of Dorian Gray. Nearly there. Moving on!

Thread 2: General folklore and history

This is what I’ve been working on the most in the past couple of weeks – I’ve now read all of Frank Smythe’s memoir of the 1933 expedition to climb Mount Everest, Camp Six. I wanted to read the whole thing because this month’s Patreon short story is based on this book – even though the short story only really adapts a few pages of it, I felt like I needed the context of the whole trip to get a feel for it! And it’s all background research for the Everest expedition sections of the novel I’m working on (which is also a ghost story, of course!).

General history and folklore books read cover-to-cover:

1. Camp Six, by Frank Smythe

Thread 3: Popsugar Reading Challenge

No movement here either I’m afraid, as I’ve been focusing on Camp Six, plus it’s been the school Easter holidays so we’ve been very busy. I’m still reading Mosaic by Jeri Taylor (a Star Trek: Voyager tie-in novel) as my cheeky interpretation of the prompt, “A book about women astronauts.”

Buy my books!

Support me on Patreon

Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/JulietteHarrisson

Buy my books! https://books2read.com/ap/nzeerp/Juliette-Harrisson

Buy merch! https://www.julietteharrisson.co.uk/store

Creepy Classics music written and performed by Ed Harrisson (C)

Books and sources:

The Saga of the People of Laxardal and Bolli Bollason’s Tale, ed. with Introduction y Bergljót S. Krisjánsdóttir, trans. Keneva Kunz

Alternative translation available at: https://sagadb.org/laxdaela_saga.en

Stephen A. Mitchell, Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages

http://viking.archeurope.com/settlement/iceland/the-early-medieval-church-at-seydisfjordur/

G. K. Lund, Scandinavian Myths and Legends Vol. 3: Ghosts

Michael F. Reed, ‘Norwegian Stave Churches and their Pagan Antecedents’, RACAR: revue d’art canadienne / Canadian Art Review , 1997, Vol. 24, No. 2, (1997), pp. 3-13 https://www.jstor.org/stable/42631152

Illustration of Gudrun meeting a ghost: Andreas Bloch, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Obviously the first complication is that I suddenly added learning two languages to my plate a few weeks ago! I’m going to take it easy with my Irish and Welsh studies to start with, just keeping up with them on Duolingo and looking at little extra bits for YouTube videos on my new channel. In September, I think I’ll get some Teach Yourself books and do some YouTube videos with “Back to School” vibes on both languages, using the Teach Yourself books as textbooks, and start going through those a bit more properly. Then I can include language learning in my plans for 2027 when we get there!

Meanwhile, on the things I actually intended to do in 2026…

Thread 1: Classic Gothic Literature

I’m still more or less where I was on reading Classic Gothic literature – making my way through The Picture of Dorian Gray! I’m really enjoying it, I’ve just been tired and pressed for time lately so I haven’t got very far.

I’m finding that this thread is a bit complicated by being so closely tied to my main YouTube channel. Views are down, and I need to get more views on that channel because I’ve gone part time at my day job (as a history lecturer) and this is part of how I make my living now. That means a certain amount of chasing whatever might get more views – and in practical terms, lately, that means making videos that relate to current movie releases (Wuthering Heights, The Bride! and Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man). So that kind of practical scheduling tends to take over, and books I just want to read for myself fall by the wayside. But my videos on Classic Gothic literature do tend to perform a bit better than some other topics, so I’m going to try to make more videos on that theme – and therefore read more of the books! – over the next three months.

Classic Gothic literature read so far this year: Still just Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë!

Thread 2: General Folklore

This one is in a bit of a mess! Part of the problem, of course, is that I was too vague about the thread in the first place. I think I need to re-name it “General history and folklore” and make this my space for general non-fiction reading I want or need to do for various reasons. I’m determined to make more progress on my novel from at least May, one storyline of which is set during a fictitious late 1920s expedition to Mount Everest, so I’m currently reading Camp Six, by Frank Smythe (an account of the 1934 expedition). I’ll also be basing this month’s Patreon short story on Smythe’s account (it involves seeing pulsating teapots!) so that’s two birds with one stone.

Thread 3: Popsugar Reading Challenge

I’m definitely behind on the Popsugar Reading Challenge, but I think it’s rescue-able. I’m only aiming for the 40 book prompts on the main challenge, not 50. So in theory I should have read 10 books for the challenge, and I’ve actually read four. One of those was pretty long (The Book that Wouldn’t Burn) and I have a few very short books lined up for some of the other prompts, so I think I can still do it. I always read more over the summer than the winter as well, because I go outside with a book or e-reader!

Since the mid-March newsletter I’ve managed to read all of Z for Zachariah for the prompt “A book that starts with the letter “Z””. I actually ended up using the brilliant website https://www.doesthedogdie.com/ because this is a pretty grim thriller about a nuclear holocaust, and I have to confess I wasn’t super happy with the answers I found! (But very grateful to the website, which is great). It’s certainly a book that stays with you, I’ll give it that. The next prompt is “A book about women astronauts” so I am reading Mosaic by Jeri Taylor, a Star Trek: Voyager tie-in novel written by one of the show’s main writers, about Captain Janeway. I realise this is probably not what the people who wrote the list had in mind, but I already own it, I want to read it, and technically surely all the female characters in Star Trek are “women astronauts”!

Popsugar Reading Challenge 2026 progress:

1. The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim (A book where gardening or a garden is central to the plot)

2. Sunrise on the Reaping, by Suzanne Collins (A book that features a platonic friendship between a man and woman)

3. The Book That Wouldn’t Burn, by Mark Lawrence (A book you meant to read in 2025)

4. Z for Zachariah, by Robert C. O’Brien (A book that starts with the letter “Z”)

I’m not likely to make loads of progress over the next few weeks though, because I have a new short story collection to finish (Creepy Classics: Medieval Ghost Stories) and lots of events coming up over the next couple of months, which I’m really excited about! I’ve had a bit of a break from events for a while over the winter so I’m really happy to be getting out and about again now that spring is here.

1. I’m giving a talk on ‘Pre-Victorian Ghost Stories’ at Eastercon in Birmingham this coming Sunday 5^th April at 7.30pm – you can find all the details and programme for the convention here. Come and say hi if you’re there!

2. I’ll be selling my books at the Birmingham Book Extravaganza on 2^nd May (details at the link). We’re in a new venue this year, Uffculme Centre, which is not far from Moseley Bog and Sarehole Mill, so it’s perfect for a bookish day out if you’re a Tolkien fan! And the building looks gorgeous.

3. On 16^th May I’ll be selling at the Cirencester Book Extravaganza for the first time. I’m excited about this one because there are some really fascinating Roman sites in and around Cirencester. I’m hoping there will be a few people around with an interest in Roman history who might enjoy Creepy Classics: Ghost Stories from Ancient Rome!

4. And finally, on 24^th May I’ll be joining up with my friend, children’s author Krista Joy, once more, to sell our wares at the Bridgnorth Carnival in Shropshire. After that I’ll have a little break until July!

I’m a little bit behind on the podcast because of the school holidays, but I’m hoping to get the next episode up today or tomorrow – it will be a re-telling of a Viking ghost story featuring a woman with five fiancés and four husbands over her lifetime, none of which end well! This month’s Patreon ghost story and dog-walking vlog will both be out later in the month, again because of the school holidays.

If you’re at any of the upcoming events, do come over and say hi!

Buy my books!

Support me on Patreon

It got me thinking about the nature of horror fiction and what makes it “horror.” I never used to think of myself as a Horror fan at all, even though ghost stories have always been one of my all-time favourite types of story, because I didn’t think of ghost stories as “Horror.” I associated Horror with knives on the front covers of books dripping blood, with slashers and monsters and Point Horror books. Even when The X-Files became my favourite TV show for a while, I still didn’t think of myself as a Horror fan – I considered myself a fan of the paranormal and the supernatural, which I thought of as somehow different.

These days I am more willing to accept that I enjoy reading, watching and writing Horror, but I still have fairly clear preferences within the genre, and I thought it would be fun to rank them. There are a lot of subgenres of Horror, all fairly well recognised, and what I’ve collected here is just a sample. I’ve assumed, as many of the chapters in the book did, that at the root of “horror” is an extreme or sustained form of fear, and I’ve based my choice of categories on what it is in the story that makes it scary – is it the paranormal intruding on the everyday? A terrifying but mundane human being? Something out of this world? I have not included well-recognised subgenres like Action Horror, Comedy Horror, or Erotic Horror, because those relate to the nature of the story rather than the thing in it that’s scary, and Gothic is more of a mood, incorporating lots of different scary things, so that doesn’t appear here either. There are Gothic novels I love, and Gothic novels I really don’t care for much, and it has more to do with the nature of the threat than the Gothic atmosphere.

This is, of course, my personal ranking based on my personal preferences, and yours will undoubtedly be different. Let me know your own rankings in the comments!

13. Torture porn and splatter horror

I have no interest in watching people pretend to get horribly mutilated (even less if it really happens!). I can’t really judge this subgenre fairly because I just haven’t engaged with it at all, it doesn’t appeal to me.

12. Body horror

Splatter horror is something of a subgenre of body horror, but while I’m not interested in purely gory stuff, I do enjoy some less extreme body horror stories.

A favourite example: The Simpsons, Treehouse Horror VIII, ‘Fly vs Fly’ (largely because I still haven’t actually seen Cronenberg’s The Fly!)

11. Psychological horror (general)

I’m using this as a catch-all term for non-supernatural or Sci-Fi horror, excluding serial killers and some folk horror (which are both listed separately below). This label could apply to a wide range of stories, from trapped-with-a-terrifying-person stories like Misery, to Gothic stories of domestic fear and mystery like Jane Eyre or The Woman in White, to family dramas like We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

A favourite example: Inside No. 9, To Have and To Hold (gaah! Just thinking about that wham! shot gives me the creeps…)

10. Animals and cryptids

I’m including any story where the scary thing is animalistic in some way here, with the exception of science fiction. This is another subgenre that doesn’t hold enormous appeal for me as a concept, but which I find perfectly enjoyable when done well. If nothing else, it once gave us Scully singing “Jeremiah was a bullfrog” to Mulder in The X-Files!

A favourite example: Jaws

9. Religious horror

For me, how much appeal religious horror stories have depends on the religion involved and how it is treated. Because I’m a practicing Christian, stories which denigrate Christianity aren’t going to appeal to me, and some stories involving the Devil just creep me out too much. I’ve also never had much desire to watch the large subgenre of Nuns Doing Weird Stuff or anything involving stigmata. But I’ve watched all 15 years of Supernatural and enjoyed most of it (Castiel is my favourite character) and I’ve enjoyed some Devil-related stories as well, on Inside No. 9; and of course, Christianity is not the only religion available to tell horror stories about! I’ve read or watched and enjoyed plenty of horrific stories from Greek and Roman religious traditions.

A favourite example: Supernatural, Lazarus Rising

8. Medical horror

This is a pretty broad subgenre of body horror, encompassing everything from characters trapped in mental hospitals (as in American Horror Story: Asylum) to organ theft (which tends to overlap with serial killers). How much I like each individual example varies depending on the quality of the story and how much I care about the characters, but there is something inherently creepy about hospitals that can make this a really effective genre.

A favourite example: Penny Dreadful, A Blade of Grass

7. Slashers and serial killers

I enjoy some of these. I liked reading Point: Horror: Camp Fear as a teenager! I like Psycho, and the early Scream movies, and especially stories with a strong mystery/action/thriller element as well. Because I’m more interested in spooky vibes, mysteries, and character work than people getting cut up or killed in exciting ways, this isn’t a subgenre I seek out particularly, but I’ve enjoyed a fair few of these stories over the years.

A favourite example: The X-Files, Irresistible

6. Folk horror

This is a subgenre of religious horror relating to folklore, folk rituals, and folk beliefs. I’m fascinated by folklore so although this is a genre I’m not overly familiar with as yet, it’s something I want to explore more of (though I feel like Midsommar might be a bit too gross and scary for me?!).

A favourite example: Inside No. 9, Mr King (because I still haven’t got around to actually watching The Wicker Man)

5. The corporeal undead (vampires, zombies, werewolves)

This is a funny one because my favourite stories featuring the various non-spectral forms of the undead don’t tend to be horror stories. They’re romances (Twilight, Warm Bodies), or dark fantasies (The Tenth Kingdom), or comedy horror with the emphasis on the comedy (Shaun of the Dead), or a mix of all of the above (True Blood). I do love Dracula (the novel) because I think it’s a great early example of an ensemble cast of characters coming together to defeat evil, but when it comes to other properly horrific tales about vampires, werewolves, zombies and the rest, I tend not to engage so much.

A favourite example: Dracula

4. Witches and witchcraft

As above, I don’t tend to engage with really horrific stories featuring witches and witchcraft – I’m much more likely to seek out cozy fantasies, secondary world fantasy in general (Terry Pratchett’s Witches novels in the Discworld series are great), comedies (Hocus Pocus!) and romances. But I did really enjoy Robert Eggers’ The Witch a few years back, so there’s that (though that also overlaps significantly with religious horror and folk horror).

A favourite example: The Witch

3. Sci-Fi horror

This is a huge category that could be split into loads of sub-categories – cosmic horror, space-related horror, aliens and alien life (which is a bit like cryptids really), scientific experiments gone wrong… It really deserves its own post all together, but in the interest of keeping the post to a vaguely reasonable length, I’ve lumped it all together here! I love science fiction in general, and especially space opera and time travel stories, so most of the dozens of subgenres of Sci-Fi horror appeal to me and some are all-time favourites. And it’s always worth remembering that Frankenstein, although written when Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was dared to write a ghost story, is actually pretty much the foundational text for Western science fiction.

A favourite example: Sunshine

2. Doppelgängers and other miscellaneous paranormal activity

There are so many miscellaneous forms of paranormal and supernatural story that don’t involve the undead, I had to lump them all together as well. The paranormal and the supernatural are what really fascinate me in horror literature and in folklore, and these are the stories I love, whether they’re about doppelgängers, psychic powers, premonitions, reincarnation, mysterious lightening or fire powers or whatever else has at some point appeared in The X-Files!

A favourite example: The X-Files, Tithonus

1. Ghost stories

This was obviously going to be Number 1! It is what I write, after all. I love ghost stories, and they have always been one of my favourite types of story in general, not just a favourite Horror trope. I think there are a few reasons for this. One is that, although I don’t believe every ghost story I hear, I do believe in the possibility of ghosts, which makes these stories feel meaningful in a way (though I do love pure fantasy as well). Another reason is that they are often combined with mystery stories, and I’m very fond of mystery and detective stories; I love finding out who the ghost is and why they are haunting somewhere and can’t rest.

Most importantly, ghost stories tend to be spooky and atmospheric rather than gory. I don’t even necessarily need anyone to get killed off or injured to enjoy a ghost story; I like the atmosphere and the chills you get up your spine from a really good creepy visual or well-written spooky scene. I don’t even notice most of the background ghosts in Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House and have to watch YouTube videos to see where they all are, but even so they still add to the atmosphere!

A favourite example: Impossible to choose! But Flanagan’s adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House or any version of The Woman in Black would be a great place to start if you want to explore some great ghost stories.

In other news, because I am a crazy person, I have started a third (!) YouTube channel, this one bringing everyone along on my attempts to learn Irish and Welsh (because I’m an Irish citizen, and my parents have lived in Wales for 20 years). If you’re interested, the channel is here: https://www.youtube.com/@JulietteHarrisson

Personal curriculum update:

Here’s how the three threads of my different kind of personal curriculum for 2026 are going:

Thread 1: Classic Gothic Literature

This one is still a bit on hold while I clear a backlog of other work and YouTube stuff, but I did read a fascinating chapter about Sheriden Le Fanu’s short story ‘Green Tea’ in Horror in Classical Antiquity and Beyond.

Classic Gothic literature read so far this year: Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë

Thread 2: General folklore

Since it’s St Patrick’s Day tomorrow, I used my newly-arrived Dictionary of Celtic Mythology to put together a short video on St Patrick for the new YouTube channel, which was fun. And I wrote a Vanishing Hitchhiker story for Patreon which ended up featuring British Neolithic monuments, bringing me back yet again to stone circles…

Thread 3: Popsugar Reading Challenge

I finally finished The Book That Wouldn’t Burn! Huzzah! It was really good and I do want to read volumes 2 and 3 of the trilogy, but they’re so long and I have so many other things to read, they’ll have to wait for a bit. Thankfully one of my lovely friends has sent me Z for Zachariah for the next prompt (A book that starts with the letter “Z”) which is a nice, short children’s book – phew!

Popsugar Reading Challenge 2026 progress:

1. The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim (A book where gardening or a garden is central to the plot)

2. Sunrise on the Reaping, by Suzanne Collins (A book that features a platonic friendship between a man and woman)

3. The Book That Wouldn’t Burn, by Mark Lawrence (A book you meant to read in 2025)

Buy my books!

Support me on Patreon

I love languages and I enjoy learning languages, but as someone whose first language is English, I have often struggled with working out which language, exactly, I should learn. European colleagues in Classics and Ancient History are regularly horrified by English scholars’ lack of language skills and complain when they review our books that too much of the secondary literature is in English. But most of us had to learn Latin and Ancient Greek at university, because not many schools teach them (though more do now than when I was at school, I’m glad to say!) so trying to add another language on top of those is hard, and even if we could, which one? I took a course in German for academics while I was doing my PhD, and did a few weeks of Beginners’ Italian too, and I’ve tried to keep my French to a good level over the years. But when you add on Latin and Ancient Greek as well, it all becomes too much.

Perhaps part of the problem is that we’ve tied language learning to “usefulness.” I took German - again, as I also have a GCSE in German, but GCSE level language is pretty useless! - because I was told it was the most useful language for academic study, a rather outdated idea from the early 20th century! Other languages frequently cited as “useful” are Mandarin and Spanish, on the basis of the number of people who speak them worldwide. My best second language by far is French, because France is closest to England and we can actually go there sometimes! And I infamously told my mum, when she tried to encourage me to learn some Latin as an extra-curricular while I was in school, that Latin was a dead language that was only any use for exactly two careers, one of which I couldn’t do because I am the wrong gender for it. Of course, I ended up in the other one, and the lesson is, always listen to your mum, she’s always right!

But I think maybe “usefulness” is not the best approach. For anyone whose first language is not English, there is an obvious “usefulness” to English, and for people who don’t live in England, there’s a “usefulness” to other specific languages - Welsh if you live in Wales for example, or French if you’re an English-speaking Canadian. But if you’re an English-speaker living in England, how can you possibly know which language will be most “useful”?

But you still need something to keep you motivated. I watched a YouTube video the other day (which I’d cite if I could remember what it was called or who made it, sorry!) that said one of the key things you need to put in the time and commitment to learn another language is a reason for doing it. Not “usefulness”, specifically, because it doesn’t have to be about that. But you need some kind of reason, some driving force.

Aside from my ongoing desire to keep improving my French (I do love French as a language, and I also love France and French food, so that’s important to me!) I have bounced between several different languages, thinking about learning them or getting a little way and stopping, over the past few years. I was learning Modern Greek on the owl app for a while and enjoying it, and I’m kind of annoyed I stopped because if I’d kept it up maybe I would understand the Greek version of the sitcom Ghosts without needing subtitles, like the French and German ones! But I didn’t have any compelling reason to keep going, and it sort of fell away.

My son was hard of hearing when he was smaller and I wanted to learn British Sign Language, but I already knew his hearing was going to improve as he grew (he has glue ear) so that reduced the motivation. I kept trying to see if I could make a start with Makaton, which is not a language but shares some vocabulary with British Sign Language, but every website on the subject was so desperate to point out it’s not BSL that I couldn’t find the information I was looking for anywhere and gave up! I’ve also done a lot of work with a colleague in Germany and thought I should have a third go at learning German, which I do speak a tiny bit, but not much. But we’re working together on English literature analysis (a project on Terry Pratchett’s Discworld) so that reduces the motivation there.

But now we’re back to Irish and Welsh again. I am an Irish citizen and have been since birth, but my Irish family are Northern Irish Protestants, so none of us speak the language. I feel a desire, as a citizen of the country, to learn its language (and I do have quite a few Irish ancestors on the other side of my family from the South!). And then there’s Welsh - my parents have lived in Wales for 20 years, I lived there too for a little while, I should learn the language!

I think I might try learning both, with a little emphasis on Irish. I feel like maybe those deeper reasons for learning the language might be what I’ve been missing. Neither language is especially “useful” unless I want to move to either Wales or the Republic of Ireland and take on one of the jobs that requires the language (teaching assistant, county council, etc. - I know that’s true for Wales because I’ve job-hunted there, I don’t know about Ireland). But maybe that desire to feel like a full citizen of Ireland, or to really feel like someone who has lived in Wales and has family there, might be the motivation I’m lacking.

Personal curriculum update:

Here’s how the three threads of my different kind of personal curriculum for 2026 are going:

Thread 1: Classic Gothic Literature

I’ve had to put The Picture of Dorian Grey on hold so that I can focus on making YouTube videos about the new Frankenstein-adjacent movie The Bride, which is coming out this week, so no new movement on this one!

Classic Gothic literature read so far this year: Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë

Thread 2: General folklore

I did lots of dipping in and out of books while researching the latest podcast episode - I had a look at Barry Cunliffe’s A Very Short Introduction To Druids and A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes, by Jonathan Bardon, and well as Ronald Hutton’s always useful Stations of the Sun and J. Borsje’s Understanding Celtic Religion. I haven’t been able to give more sustained attention to anything though.

Thread 3: Popsugar Reading Challenge

I’m still reading The Book That Wouldn’t Burn for the third prompt. It’s really long! And I’ve been very tired… It’s good, though!

Popsugar Reading Challenge 2026 progress:

1. The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim (A book where gardening or a garden is central to the plot)

2. Sunrise on the Reaping, by Suzanne Collins (A book that features a platonic friendship between a man and woman)

Buy my books!

Support me on Patreon

Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/JulietteHarrisson

Buy my books! https://books2read.com/ap/nzeerp/Juliette-Harrisson

Buy merch! https://www.julietteharrisson.co.uk/store

Creepy Classics music written and performed by Ed Harrisson (C)

Books and sources:

Text from The Celtic Heroic Age: Literary Sources for Ancient Celtic Europe and Early Ireland and Wales, by John T. Koch with John Carney

A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes, by Jonathan Bardon

Stations of the Sun, by Ronald Hutton

J.Borsje, Understanding Celtic Religion

A lot of Wikipedia! And Favourite Irish Legends, by Yvonne Carroll, Fiona Waters, and Felicity Trotman.

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/ab084821eb1441f891685f47b48fb93d

https://dil.ie/42314 (on the tuigen)

Cosmic Viking on YouTube on Irish archaeology:

On spearheads: https://thethegns.blogspot.com/2012/02/spearheads.html

https://irishfolklore.wordpress.com/2018/09/02/the-brehon-laws/

ASSAULT AND ATTEMPTED MURDER IN BREHON LAW Author(s): NEIL McLEOD Source: Irish Jurist, 1998, New Series, Vol. 33 (1998), pp. 351-391 Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44027309

The Royal Residence of Rathmore of Moy-Linne. With Notes on Other Early Earthworks in Ulster (Continued) Author(s): R. G. Berry Source: Ulster Journal of Archaeology, Second Series, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Oct., 1898), pp. 9-19 Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20563826

Several years ago, one of my Northern Irish cousins told me that the meteorological way of viewing the seasons was not quite right. The meteorological system is the usual division of seasons in the Northern hemisphere - winter is December/January/February, spring is March/April/May, summer is June/July/August, and autumn is September/October/November. But the old Irish calendar (and other Celtic calendars too) split the seasons differently. The dates don’t exactly match the Roman system, but broadly speaking, winter is November/December/January, spring is February/March/April, summer is May/June/July, and autumn is August/September/October.

As soon as he said it, I realised that this makes so much more sense for the climate in Britain and Ireland! The weather starts to get really cold around the end of October/beginning of November - 1 November being, of course, the date of Samhain, the end of the harvest season and beginning of winter and the darker half of the year. Although February can be very cold - both myself and my son were born on snowy days in early February! - flowers start to appear around the beginning of February, and the days are getting lighter. In the Christian calendar, 2 February marks Candlemas, the final end of the Christmas/winter season (during the Covid lockdowns of 2020-2021, I took advantage of the old tradition of leaving my Christmas decorations up until Candlemas, though my Northern Irish grandmother would have been horrified - she was a firm subscriber to the belief it was bad luck to leave them up past the feast of Epiphany on 6th January!). The Irish spring festival Imbolc, also St Brigid’s Day, is 1st February.

The hottest weather in Britain and Ireland usually falls in the months of May, June, and July, and of course, this calendar also explains why 21st June, the summer equinox, is known as “Midsummer” - in the Celtic calendar, it is indeed around the middle point of the summer! And 21st December is, similarly, “midwinter”, as in “in the bleak…” The Celtic calendar marks the beginning of summer with Beltane on 1st May, which is still somewhat remembered in May Day festivals throughout Britain and Ireland. And then August, while often still hot, starts to show signs of autumn. The Celtic festival of Lúnasa on 1st August marks the beginning of the harvest season. Whenever we visited my Northern Irish grandmother in August, she would always slightly gloomily observe that the nights were drawing in, and she was right!

So, although the weather is still cold, wet, and miserable (so wet it’s been a major news story lately, with record-breaking amounts of rain), this month is really the start of spring. And I can feel that in the air, as well as seeing it in the snowdrops, crocuses, and even daffodils that are starting to come out. Loki and I have been very busy filming over the last few days - we’ve done a dog walk on Kinver Edge in South Staffordshire for this month’s Patreon video, a ghost tour of Aberystwyth in Ceredigion, Wales, for YouTube, and we’ve collected one more stone circle, Mitchell’s Fold in Shropshire, for another YouTube video. It was a bit difficult finding the motivation to go out and do all that, as the weather has mostly been dull, damp, and cold. But we did have some luck while we were in Aberystwyth - for most of our walk (which is less a “tour” than a long walk along the Prom!) we were lucky enough to see a truly beautiful sunset over the sea. And then, just as we were finishing filming, the heavens opened and we were absolutely soaked to the skin!

It’s clear that spring is trying to break through the winter chill, but we are a little way off the really warmer weather yet. Still, the days are longer and brighter, the air less heavy. And I love feeling of the changing of the seasons. When autumn comes, I pull out my enormous collection of big woolly jumpers with enthusiasm. I love settling in with a cozy cardigan and a hot drink, curling up indoors with a good book and feasting on soups and stews. But by the time February rolls around, I am ready for a change. I still love the woolly jumpers, but I find myself thinking with longing of a day when I don’t need one, and while I love my hot teas and coffees, it’s been too long since I was able to take them out to the garden. Most of all, I really, desperately, want to see the sun. I can do a few months with candles and lamps and pictures of roaring fireplaces on YouTube, but there is only so much grey I can put up with before I become desperate for some real Vitamin D that doesn’t come in a pill in a tub! Unfortunately there is no guarantee here in Britain that we will see much of the sun, even in spring and summer - it could be grey all year - but I’m holding out hope for the time being.

And with that new spring comes new rhythms and routines for writing. I’m still getting used to my new work structure now that I’m part time at my main job, but things are settling down. I’m not starting any brand new projects at the moment, but with these warmer, longer, evenings, I’m looking forward to making some real progress with the current ones!

Personal curriculum update

The first two weeks of February are very busy for us; my birthday, then my son’s birthday, then Valentine’s Day all come upon us in quick succession! So I am rather behind on my personal curriculum for 2026. But most fortnights don’t have that much jammed into them, and I’m also focusing on getting all the “monthly” jobs done in a month with 2-3 fewer days in it than every other month, so I’m confident I can catch up a bit in March.

Thread 1 (classic Gothic literature) and Thread 3 (Popsugar Reading Challenge 2026) are still pretty much where they were two weeks ago - Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is my next classic novel, but I haven’t started it yet as I’ve been focussing on the new Wuthering Heights film, and I’m currently reading The Book That Wouldn’t Burn by Mark Lawrence for the Popsugar Challenge.

As far as Thread 2 (general folklore) goes, I’m making progress on the stone circles video, and I’ve also started researching Irish history in general. I’ve tended to avoid Irish history my whole life, especially while I was in school - my mum has PTSD from living in Belfast in the 1970s and the IRA ceasefire didn’t happen until I was 13, so as a child, I decided it was just too depressing. But I am making up for that now and I’m especially enjoying learning about ancient and medieval Irish history, which I will be focussing on for this month’s Creepy Classics story, a tale of kings and spirits from the oldest extant manuscript in Irish, the Book of the Dun Cow.

Buy my books!

Support me on Patreon

The series was called The Watch and featured lots of characters with the same names as the Discworld characters, but the changes to just about everything else were, shall we say, extensive. The setting was changed from a typical medieval-style fantasy world to a weird steampunk setting full of floresecent lights and leather jackets. The plus size woman - something that was relevant to her character arc and storyline - had become slim and a skilled fighter where her book counterpart is skilled in dragon rearing but not in fighting. The female dwarf who defied dwarfish gender norms by embracing femininity became a non-binary human. Storylines from several different books were smushed together and bits of Arthurian legend added that weren’t there before. Two main characters were left out all together and a third was killed off. And on, and on, and on… Any one of these changes by itself would probably have been fine, but all of them together was too much. It was a mess and bore almost no relationship to the books. I wrote about it in more detail for Den of Geek at the time: https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/the-watch-controversy-discworld-changes/

That’s an extreme example - in most cases, while some adaptations stick more closely to the source material than others, the work being adapted is usually recognisable! And while I have my little things that bug me in adaptations (I will never get over Sam Gamgee living in some random hobbit hole with a yellow door instead of Bag End) I don’t have a really specific preference in terms of whether I want book faithfulness or not.

Of course, the more I love the book, the more I hope for a close adaptation, whereas if I don’t enjoy the book so much, I’m likely to enjoy versions that stray a bit further. I love the books of The Hunger Games, and Pride and Prejudice, so I enjoy the faithful adaptations and prefer the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice, which is slightly closer to the book, to the 2005 film (though I do love the film too!). I adore The Lord of the Rings, and I find the Peter Jackson adaptations to be brilliant translations of that story to screen. Small changes (Arwen instead of Glorfindel) and even medium-size changes (Elves at Helm’s Deep) don’t bother me, because the characters, the setting, and the overall arc of the story feel true to the book. On the flip side, I saw a couple of adaptations of The Turn of the Screw before reading the book, and I’m not all that keen on the book, so my favourite version of that story is the very different re-imagining of it in The Haunting of Bly Manor (which is almost at The Watch levels of being a completely different thing all together, but not quite!).

And now we have a new version of Wuthering Heights coming out, and having finished the book (see my personal curriculum update below!) and made a video about the book by itself, I’m planning to do a couple of YouTube videos on its adaptations (one on the new movie and one ranking a selection of them). I’m looking forward to this, because I’m looking forward to focusing on the process of adapting the story and on which elements each version plays up or down, without any pesky fondness for one specific version getting in the way - because I’m not really a fan of any of them! With the exception of Kate Bush’s brilliant song, Wuthering Heights, in any version and in any form, just isn’t my thing. I can see that the book is very well written, it’s very readable, and the characters are cleverly and brilliantly drawn. I just don’t like it, because there aren’t enough ghosts in it, and there’s too much domestic abuse, which I don’t enjoy reading about and usually avoid stories about if I can (mystery novels will often throw subjects I wouldn’t otherwise choose to read about at me!).

I’m actually really looking forward to going over lots of different versions of the same story without having any especial fondness for any of them. I think it will give me a chance to really think about the process of adaptation and how it works and what each writer/director really wants to say with the piece. I don’t mind how close to the book or otherwise each version is, other than a feeling of discomfort around Heathcliff (who is spectacularly abusive and a literal kidnapper) being represented as a romantic hero in most of them, which is part of why I don’t care for the story in the first place. I am really interested to look at all the different ways this rather awkward book, whose second half is frequently left out entirely, can be adapted!

On the news front, my Patreon page is now up and running! Patrons will get one dog-walking vlog in the English countryside (with brief shout-outs to local history and folklore) and one extra short story per month. The short story will be in a PDF format and it will be a ghost story re-told from a 19th or 20th century (out of copyright or real life) source. So far, the first dog-walking vlog is up and can be watched for free as a taster (it’s also on YouTube). The first story will be going up in the next week or so and it will be a Victorian ghost story about a mysterious Grey Lady in Wales, inspired by real life reports from the late 19th century. You can check out my page and support me on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/cw/JulietteHarrisson

Personal curriculum update:

Here’s how the three threads of my different kind of personal curriculum for 2026 are going:

Thread 1: Classic Gothic Literature. I’ve finished Wuthering Heights! I put out a poll on my YouTube page asking which classic Gothic novel I should read next and it looks like The Picture of Dorian Gray has just edged out The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, so I’ll get started on that soon. I’ve talked more about Wuthering Heights and whether it’s really a ghost story over on YouTube:

So, to start off a list for this one:

Classic Gothic literature read so far this year: Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë

Thread 2: General folklore. I’m still working on the stone circles, but I’ve got a bit behind on this one in the last couple of weeks! I have bought some more books though…

Thread 3: Popsugar Reading Challenge. I finished The Enchanted April for the first prompt (“A book where gardening or a garden is central to the plot”) and I’ve just finished my second book for this challenge as well - I already wanted to read Suzanne Collins’ Sunrise on the Reaping and had bought it for the Kobo, so when I saw on a message board that it fit the second prompt, “A book that features a platonic friendship between a man and woman,” that was an easy choice, and I enjoyed it a lot. I love The Hunger Games franchise. Overall, I prefer the first two books, because Mockingjay is too depressing and pushed the death count up too high without the excuse of the death match in the arena, and the two prequels are rather depressing by their nature. But I found Haymitch to be the most likeable narrator of the bunch, and enjoyed stepping into his world for a bit.

Popsugar Reading Challenge 2026 progress:

1. The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim (A book where gardening or a garden is central to the plot)

2. Sunrise on the Reaping, by Suzanne Collins (A book that features a platonic friendship between a man and woman)

Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/JulietteHarrisson

Buy Creepy Classics: Haunting Tales for Winter: https://books2read.com/u/bPrZkz

Buy Creepy Classics: Ghost Stories from Ancient Rome: https://books2read.com/u/b6XGkM

Buy Creepy Classics: Ghost Stories from Ancient Greece: https://books2read.com/u/mK5oaL

Buy Creepy Classics merch: https://www.julietteharrisson.co.uk/store

Creepy Classics music written and composed by Ed Harrisson ©

This means I need to think about something I haven’t really needed to think about before - the impact of my stories on real, living people. Sure, there are some people (mostly members of the aristocracy) who know who their ancestors were going back to the early 19th century and beyond, but most of us don’t know much beyond our grandparents and great-grandparents (maybe great-great-grandparents, depending on family circumstances!). Even if we’ve done some family history and know a bit about them, when you go that far back, even our direct ancestors are names on a family tree, and maybe a picture - they’re not people we actually knew in life.

But the closer you get to the present, the more likely it is that someone who actually knew the person is still alive - get really close, and the person you’re writing about may well still be alive. As long as you don’t libel anyone, fictionalising stories about well-known real people is legal, but I think for me personally, I will avoid stories in which any of the main characters are based on people still alive.

I think this is especially important considering the subject matter of my stories. I tell ghost stories, and they come in a wide variety of tones, subgenres, styles, and themes. Some are gory, some are sad, some are bittersweet, some are comedic - it all depends on the needs of the story I’m writing. But for a living person who had some kind of paranormal, spiritual, or otherwise unexplained experience, I would not want to represent that experience in a way they might find upsetting or insulting.

(As a side note, the podcast also includes re-tellings of fictional ghost stories from novels, poems, and plays, as well as real life experiences. I obviously won’t be re-telling any works of fiction that are still in copyright!).

So I will stick to stories reported by people who are no longer with us. But I still have to decide where to put a cut-off point. I could tell a story from the 1990s and the person who reported it might have passed away, but they would almost certainly have close family - children, grandchildren, siblings, even parents - still alive who might also feel upset or offended at having their family’s personal experiences fictionalised by a stranger. So I need to find some kind of cut-off point for 20th-century ghost stories, and stick to stories that are old enough, it is unlikely any surviving family members who happened to come across it would be upset.

Victorian stories should not present a problem as they are really quite a while ago by now, but I think I will probably not go much more recent than the 1940s, unless something more recent is really compelling for some reason. For the first story, I am thinking about telling a fictionalised version of Frank Smythe’s experiences on Mount Everest in 1933. Smythe himself passed away in 1949; his son Tony wrote a biography of him in 2013, but I don’t know if he is still alive. Smythe’s grandchildren are very likely still alive, so if I tackle this story, it is certainly important to do so in a way that is respectful.

Part of the problem with trying to work out how long ago is appropriate to write about is that every family is different, and many feel a close connection with relatives from a century ago or more. Another story I would like to tell at some point is the story of Ernest Shakleton’s experience of sensed presence (the feeling that another person is with you - a fourth man in Shackleton’s case) while enduring a fight for survival crossing South Georgia Island in Antarctica in 1916. But this one is complicated because I have a distant family connection to it myself! My cousin’s wife is the great-granddaughter of one of the men who made the open boat crossing from where Shackleton’s crew were stranded on the Antarctic ice to get to South Georgia Island. So if I write that story, I would definitely want to let her know and probably run it by her first, because her great-grandfather would be in it, and I would not want to upset my own actual family!

The whole question of how to write fiction about recent real life events in a way that is sensitive to anyone connected to them is not something I have ever really had to think about before. I find the dilemma really quite interesting, and I don’t have any hard and fast rules about how to deal with it! But I think perhaps most people would be OK with fiction written about family members from the early twentieth century. What do you think?

Personal curriculum update:

I’ve started on my different kind of personal curriculum for 2026! Here are how the three threads of it are going:

Thread 1: Classic Gothic Literature. I am about halfway through Wuthering Heights. It is… not my favourite book, shall we say. I am developing some thoughts on it, and will do a YouTube video on it when I’ve finished!

Thread 2: General folklore. I am working on a YouTube video about folklore connected to stone circles. So far I have been to a couple of more recent stone circles, erected in the 1770s and the 1940s, but I have a couple of prehistoric ones in my sights, to visit over the next month or so!

Thread 3: Popsugar Reading Challenge. I have nearly finished the book I am reading for the first prompt on the Popsugar Reading Challenge 2026. The prompt was “A book where gardening or a garden is central to the plot,” and I am reading The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim (1922). I’ve seen the 1991 film version many times, which it turns out is really very faithful to the book, and I’m really enjoying it. I think I will have to do the 40-book version of the challenge rather than 50-book version, because I need to allow time for other reading as well, but there are still plenty of interesting prompts to enjoy.

Welcome to wherever you are

This is your life, you made it this far

Welcome, you gotta believe

That right here, right now, you’re exactly where you s’posed to be

I’ve been thinking about this song a lot lately, and especially about that lyric - “every new beginning is some beginning’s end” - because by coincidence, I’ve ended up at one of life’s beginning/end points on the 1st January 2026. From that date, I am officially a part-time lecturer, rather than a full-time one. I now work two days a week as a History lecturer, and the other three days are to be split between writing, content creation, and parenting!

This is a strange kind of end. It’s not the end of my career as a lecturer, as of course I’m still doing that, but I worked very long hours and lived on very little money for a very long time, all in the quest to become a permanent, full-time lecturer. And I was incredibly lucky - I made it. Many, many friends who are better lecturers and researchers than me didn’t get that coveted lecturer job, because there simply aren’t enough jobs in the Humanities in UK higher education at the moment - I got incredibly lucky by being in the right place at the right time to snag a part-time job, which I eventually turned into a full time job.

After working so hard towards a goal for so long and knowing so many brilliant friends would have loved to get it, it feels somehow ungrateful to give it up, even partly. All of my 20s and some of my 30s were dedicated towards this one goal, and I gave up almost everything else (hobbies, pets, financial stability, time for relationships, holidays for several years, and so on and so forth) in pursuit of it. So I’m really feeling that sense that this new direction is “some beginning’s end.” It’s the end of something that dominated my life for years and years, and it’s hard to face that.

But this is also a new beginning I’m really excited about. The move to part time has partly been forced by circumstance - without going into all the boring details, our current childcare situation means I actually can’t continue to work full time at my current job; I would need to compress my hours at the very least. But I’ve gone a bit further than that and gone all the way down to 0.4 FTE, making my lecturing job the smaller part of my week. For 60% of my week, I will now be a writer and content creator, making that my main job in terms of the time spent on it, if not income!

I have always wanted to be a writer, since before I could even read. I used to go down to the bottom of the garden to tell stories to my 100 invisible children when I was 3 years old. The problem, of course, is that writing is one thing, actually making a living at it is another! But I am genuinely incredibly excited to be dedicating proper work time to writing from now on. My fiction writing will be combined with content creation, which I also really enjoy and which will hopefully help to publicise my writing as well as making a bit of money directly as well.

My biggest challenge right now is making sure I don’t take on too much all at once! I have to remember that the extra time I’ve carved out is only actually 18 hours a week, and that not even every week! I will be writing and content creating between 9am and 3pm, three days a week, term time only. I’m sure I’ll still be adding in some evenings and weekends as well, but I can’t keep burning the candle at both ends the way I have been lately, so I need to minimise that if I can. And, of course, the other reason for going part time at work is to spend more time with my son and to be able to cover teacher training days, sick days, half days, stay and play days, and all the rest of it, so I need to allow for that too.

The first thing I’ll be doing is getting the Creepy Classics podcast here on Substack back up to one episode per month, rather than every two months. This will also ensure that I can continue to release new short story collections in book form roughly every six months. I’ll also be getting back to my long-abandoned reviews of Star Trek: Voyager over at the Doux Reviews website! I’ll carry on putting up long form videos at my main YouTube channel, Classical JG, roughly every two weeks for now, in the interest of not over-committing too quickly.

This month I am also aiming to set up a Patreon, so keep an eye out here for news on that! The plan is to have just one subscription tier charging about £2.50 or thereabouts, and subscribers will get one extra dog-walking vlog out in the English countryside per month, and one extra short ghost story in written form (in a pdf) per month which will be from the 19th or 20th century (as opposed to the main podcast, which focuses on ancient, medieval, and early modern stories). Let me know what you think of that as an offering! I’m really trying hard to balance offering something worth paying for, with not over-committing myself.

Over the slightly longer term, I am excited to finally make some real progress on my novel! It’s a mystery/ghost story and I know what I want to do with it, and just need to carve out that time to sit down and do it. The aim is to write it over the winter, get some beta reader feedback and work on edits over the spring and summer, and publish it in the autumn of 2026.

Thank you so much for reading all through this somewhat rambling newsletter! I will aim to get back to writing some kind of interesting essay with my mid-January post. And please do let me know if there’s anything in particular you would be interested in seeing from a Patreon account!

Buy Creepy Classics: Haunting Tales for Winter! https://books2read.com/u/bPrZkz

Buy Creepy Classics: Ghost Stories from Ancient Rome: https://books2read.com/u/b6XGkM

Buy Creepy Classics: Ghost Stories from Ancient Greece: https://books2read.com/u/mK5oaL

Buy Creepy Classics merch: https://www.julietteharrisson.co.uk/store

Creepy Classics music written and composed by Ed Harrisson ©

The BBC are showing a new short film under the banner of A Ghost Story for Christmas this year, which I’m really looking forward to; it’s an adaptation of a short story by E. F. Benson, written and directed by horror supremo Mark Gatiss, with a fantastic cast. This series of short films goes all the way back to 1971, when it started out by adapting MR James short stories for Christmas, because James himself used to tell these stories to friends on Christmas Eve, which was a Victorian tradition. The original series ran until 1978 but it was revived in 2005 and has reappeared sporadically ever since. The tradition has also appeared in a Christmas special episode of BBC horror anthology show Inside No 9 in 2022, and back in 2000, the BBC also produced four episodes of Christopher Lee’s Ghost Stories for Christmas, in which Lee read out four MR James stories.

So the tradition is clearly still alive and well, but it occurred to me as I was thinking about this, that there are really two different traditions that could loosely be called “Christmas ghost stories,” and that we have all been conflating them a little bit. MR James used to tell his ghost stories to his friends on Christmas Eve before he had them published – but the stories themselves are, for the most part, not set at Christmas. This tradition is also reflected in Henry James’ novella The Turn of the Screw, in its opening line,

“The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as on Christmas Eve in an old house a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to note it as the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child.”

But the actual story of The Turn of the Screw has nothing to do with Christmas - this is just a framing device. And this tradition has continued; the opening chapter of Susan Hill’s 1983 novel The Woman in Black is called ‘Christmas Eve’ and the opening line is, “It was nine-thirty on Christmas Eve,” but the main story is not about Christmas, nor set at Christmas time. The first short story adapted for A Ghost Story For Christmas that was not written by MR James was Charles Dickens’ masterpiece ‘The Signalman,’ which is not one of Dickens’ several Christmas-set stories. These ghost stories are not set at Christmas – they are ghost stories with a wide range of settings, themes, and widely varied plots, which are told at Christmas.

But there is a much older European tradition of ghost stories associated with Christmas. This is the tradition Charles Dickens drew on in A Christmas Carol, which is the other type of “Christmas ghost story” – a ghost story that takes place at Christmas and that is, on some level, about Christmas. Dickens wrote several of these, some within novels like The Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby, others as short stories or novellas, though A Christmas Carol is the most famous by far. It is quite likely that Dickens’ fondness for putting Christmas and ghost stories together helped to spark the Christmas Eve ghost-story-telling tradition itself.

At the time Dickens wrote The Pickwick Papers in 1837, the association of Christmas with ghost stories had fallen off a bit. Every year, I look for ancient, medieval, or early modern ghost stories to re-tell for the Christmas episode of the Creepy Classics podcast. There are certainly a good number of early modern stories to choose from (in British history, this is the period roughly between the reign of Henry VII, starting in 1485, to the early nineteenth century). This year’s episode (which I will be recording this week and which has already been told in written form in my book Creepy Classics: Haunting Tales for Winter) takes place in Reformation Scotland, when Christmas was banned, which is another story! (I’ve talked about it more at my YouTube channel in a video on Yule Bread, and will talk about it again in the podcast episode).

But these early modern stories tend to be ghost stories that happen to take place around Christmas and New Year’s, rather than stories self-consciously set and told at Christmas. The unfortunate inhabitants of Hammersmith did not know why a ghost/hoaxer chose Christmas to plague them, other than perhaps they were drinking more at the time; the mysterious lady in the cupboard from last year’s Welsh story appeared at Christmas because it was the anniversary of her murder; the Scottish story of the dog-ghost takes place at a few points across the year but primarily in December, for no particular reason as far as the teller is concerned.

If we go back to the medieval period, though, we find more of a deliberate and thematic connection between Christmas and ghost stories. The story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for example – not technically a “ghost story” but it does involve an enchanted knight taking off his own head! – is specifically set during the Twelve Days of Christmas, and the Green Knight says he has come for a “Christmas pastime,” a game or challenge for the festive season.

It is in medieval Old Norse literature, though, that we see a strong link between Christmas and ghost stories, or more technically stories of revenants, as these are more common in the Old Norse sagas. For one thing, this is the darkest time of year, and in the far north, across Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, it is a very dark time of year indeed. Ghost stories are often told at night, when the shadows outside are thought to hide all sorts of horrors and it is difficult to see unknown dangers. Even now, telling ghost stories is associated with camp fires and sleepovers, and ghosts are often said to come out at night; it is no wonder that the darkest time of year should be associated with a lot of ghost stories.

But these medieval Norse stories are also about Christmas as a theme. The sagas were written a couple of centuries after their settings by Christian writers, based on older oral traditions. The narrators and writers adopt an overtly Christian stance, but with a clear interest in the pagan, pre-Christian past, which is remembered not least through the use of the name “Yule” for Christmas. Yule was the name of the Germanic and Norse pagan festival that took place at the same time of year, and was simply transferred to the new, Christian version, and is still often used interchangeably with or instead of “Christmas” in several Northern European languages to this day, including English.

The Christmas ghost stories in the sagas explore the tensions between these religious traditions. The story of the hauntings at Frotha in Eyrbyggja Saga, the one that was so long and complex I re-told it as a novella in the book, takes place around 1000 CE, the year that Christianity became the official religion of Iceland, and conflict between the old religious traditions and the new is part of the story, while the haunting is eventually resolved through the intervention of a bishop. The story of Glam and Grettir in Grettir’s Saga, which also takes place at Christmas, implies that Glam’s lack of attachment to any religion – old or new – and particularly his refusal to go to church is part of what causes him to become such a monster after death.

It is very possible that this tradition goes further back, to an oral tradition of telling scary supernatural stories in the pre-Christian north. The texts are all later and Christian, so we can’t say for sure, but that is very likely. It does seem to be a Northern European tradition, as unfortunately I have not yet managed to dig up any ancient Roman Saturnalia ghost stories, though I will keep looking!

It was fascinating and in some ways quite challenging re-telling a collection of these stories! Creepy Classics: Haunting Tales for Winter is a collection of the second type of Christmas ghost story – ghost stories set in or around Christmas, several of them with a thematic connection to the season as well (sometimes one I have added to a story that didn’t really emphasise it, like the Scottish story!). When I re-tell these stories once a year for the podcast, it works well – but since they are all European, I found the challenge in writing a whole collection of them was just to make sure they were not all too same-y and I didn’t keep repeating myself! Perhaps this is why a master like MR James chose to tell a range of stories instead of associating most of them with Christmas directly. By the time I finished editing the book, I was seriously running out of new ways to describe snow!

There’s a clear answer to this, I suppose, which is to try to find some Australian Christmas ghost stories for next year. If anyone knows of any, do let me know!

One of the things I want to do is get back to doing more reading, and more research. I became a lecturer because I wanted to be able to research the past and tell people (i.e. students) about it, but in recent years the teaching and admin workloads have been too big and I’ve barely been able to read or research anything at all. I’m hoping to get some of that back, so I’m working on a personal curriculum of sorts – but it probably looks a bit different to some of the other personal curricula out there!

I’m used to writing curricula, of course. It’s literally my job to design and write modules and to take part in the design of the whole degree programme. But designing a personal curriculum is a very different thing from designing a curriculum for others to follow.

When I design my modules as a lecturer, I am drawing on my own expertise in the topic and designing a course that will guide my students through topics I already know about. Some of the topics we cover week to week are subjects I know better than others; some of the suggested readings on the reading list are books and articles I have read, others I have skimmed to check they are relevant and interesting and then recommended knowing they will be useful for the students. But in all parts of my regular curriculum design, I am drawing on my own pre-existing expertise, sometimes bolstered by some extra research, and selecting material that I know will be especially interesting or useful, and that will come together to produce a coherent course. I’m starting from a position of knowledge and expertise, drawing on things I’ve already read and already know.

A personal curriculum is a different thing altogether. When we design a personal curriculum, we’re putting together materials that will allow us to study something new, or at least something we want to know more about. So when we put the curriculum together, we’re starting from a place of enthusiasm, but not pre-existing knowledge or expertise. We have to try to work out, without having read the materials before and without expert knowledge of the subject, what books/articles/primary sources/whatever are going to be useful and provide us with a coherent journey through the material without having any idea in advance what any of them are actually like or even what the main themes, debates, and issues in the subject are.

For me, there’s also the fact that I’m already ridiculously over-educated! When I finished my PhD, I breathed a sigh of relief at finally being done with education… only to take a Creative Writing module at the Open University barely 18 months later! And that’s not even counting all my various stop-start attempts to learn about a half a dozen different languages on Duolingo. I still want to keep educating myself, to keep learning, because there’s always something new to explore, and a new subject to learn about. But perhaps I want to do it in a slightly different way, something a bit more creative and artistic and a bit less academic than what I do for my day job.

I’ve come up with three main strands, or threads maybe, for a personal curriculum of sorts going into the new year, hoping to keep it to something achievable and give my work some kind of structure. One of the main things personal curricula sometimes lack is deadlines, and I’m a person who needs a deadline, so I’m trying to incorporate them too!

Thread 1: Classic Gothic Literature

I want to continue looking at classic gothic literature and its adaptations on my YouTube channel, so I will be reading lots more of it! Although this doesn’t have any fixed deadlines, the aim is to do roughly one video every 1-2 months on a classic gothic novel. The exact content and some of the deadlines will be determined by various factors, including any new film or TV adaptations. I’m going to do a video on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol this month, which I’ve already read, so the next one on my list is Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, which I need to read by 14^th February, when the new film adaptation comes out. After that, it will be a case of mixing the most-frequently-adapted works (The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson has already been requested by a viewer so that will one to look at soon!) with tracing the development of the gothic novel in general from its beginnings, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, followed by some Ann Radcliffe, to prepare me for a re-evaluation of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, which I didn’t like the last time I tried to read it!

Thread 2: General folklore

Other videos on my YouTube channel will focus on haunted sites, folklore in general, and ghost stories. I want to do more in my “Food and Folklore” series, which will involve reading through the books of traditional cooking and historical recipes I’ve collected over the past few years. I’m also especially keen to look at English, Welsh, and Northern Irish (Ulster Scots) folklore (and some Irish and Scottish too!) so I want to read through a few books I’ve collected on those subjects, and maybe even brush up on my Welsh a bit.

Thread 3: General reading

For a slow reader, I’m being very ambitious about my reading goals this year! The final part of my personal curriculum for 2026 is simply to broaden my reading in general and read a lot more fiction from a range of genres, writers, and places. For any writer of fiction, reading lots of fiction is essential to developing your own craft and your own writing – it’s really the best thing you can do to develop and improve your own work, and reading a lot is the first piece of advice most authors give to aspiring writers! But I’ve fallen behind over the years, and I don’t read nearly as much fiction as I should, or as much as I want to.

I’ve attempted the Popsugar Reading Challenge a few times before, but never quite managed it. This year, I’m going to try something I haven’t tried before – I’m going to try to do it in order, from prompt #1 to prompt #50. I think this will help me stick to it – I will be encouraged to finish the books quickly, if there’s another one I’m keen to get to, and I won’t procrastinate by taking ages to choose which prompt to do next. I’m going to use books I already own as much as possible, simply because I can’t afford to buy 50 new books (!), so I’m going to be pretty flexible in how I interpret the prompts. In previous years I’ve tried to be really strict about it and I think that’s held me back, too. I want to use this list to “prompt” me to read lots of books I’ve been wanting to read for a long time – but having a specific prompt each book needs to answer and a specific order in which to read them will help to keep me on track, I think.

So that’s my personal curriculum for next year! It’s not really a curriculum as such – more of a system designed to encourage me to set aside more time for reading, and to direct my reading to something that will leave me better informed by the end of it!

Are you putting together a personal curriculum for next year? Let me know below – and if anyone would be interested in a digital product of some kind with a suggested curriculum on one of my areas of expertise (ancient Greek and Roman history, mythology in general, European ghost stories throughout history) please do let me know that too and I can put something together!

When I was younger, I always thought I would write classic epic fantasy set in a secondary world. I tended to lean towards immersive stories, as Farah Mendlesohn describes them in Rhetorics of Fantasy, rather than portal stories – my favourite books growing up included portal fantasies like the Chronicles of Narnia and, arguably, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (the portal being the borders of the Shire) but also immersive secondary world fantasies like Robin Hobb’s Farseer Trilogy (now the much bigger Fitz and the Fool series) and, of course, Pratchett’s Discworld. Even my favourite Narnia book (aside from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which is in a space of its own) is the immersive one, The Horse and His Boy, whose protagonists are from Lewis’ imaginary world, not our own.

These are the books that became a part of me, part of my personality, especially back in the 90s, when “reads Lord of the Rings” was a marker of “nerd.” They shaped me and made me who I am, and I wanted to write them myself. I especially loved quest stories – most of the Narnia books and, of course, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings come under that heading, but also my favourite Robin Hobb book (helpfully titled Assassin’s Quest) and even some of my favourite Discworld books feature a journey across a fantasy landscape, like Jingo, or a portal experience, like Hogfather.

One of the things that appealed to me about secondary world creation as a writer was the ability to travel in time by travelling across a fantastical landscape. This is a key point I’m going to be talking about in my paper for Glasgow this week. A journey through Tolkien’s Middle Earth starts in early 20^th century England, a land of pipes and potatoes and gardens, and takes you back to early medieval Britain and Scandinavia (with extra horses) and then over to Byzantium, while a splinter group finds themselves trapped in the mud and mire of the First World War. A traveller in Pratchett’s Discworld can set out from the glorious mish-mash of times and places and influences that is Ankh-Morpork and travel to ancient Egypt in the form of the tiny kingdom of Djelibeybi (literally “child of the Djel” – it took me years to get that joke) or to ancient Greece in the form of the hot country of Ephebe. I loved that idea, and I wanted to draw my own map filled with places that carry echoes of different real world eras and cultures, and take my characters through it on an epic journey.

And yet, somehow, it hasn’t quite happened – not yet. The problem is that I love the setting of these stories so much, I struggle to come up with an actual plot. And I realised that although my deepest love as a reader is reserved for those secondary world fantasies that have really grabbed me, I don’t actually feel inclined to read all that much in the genre outside of those favourites. Where my friends who also love these books were grabbing and devouring every epic fantasy they could get their hands on, a lot of the others left me cold. I would read the blurb on the back (which frequently threw a bunch of invented names and places at me along with a hint that the kitchen boy might secretly be a king) and feel no interest whatsoever. My favourite George RR Martin book is Fire & Blood – everyone else’s least favourite, I suspect!

What I do read as much as I can, though, is ghost stories. I love mystery stories of all kinds – detective novels, historical mysteries, even some thrillers, and I’ve probably read more of those than I have classic epic fantasy. And a really good ghost story is a mystery with an added supernatural twist. Put any ghost story in front of me, and I will want to read it. I may not have time, as my tottering TBR pile will prove, but it will be lack of time and energy that stops me, not lack of interest!

And so, in the end, I write ghost stories. I love writing the short stories I share on the podcast and in my books. I’m also (slowly – see above re: time and energy!) working on a novel that combines the genres of ghost story and mystery, with a protagonist who is haunted by a classic Agatha Christie-style dinner party murder that she has to solve in order to get the ghosts out of the house, which has now become a hotel, as they’re putting off the customers.

In a way, though, my desire to write ghost stories is still about my love of time travel. My modern protagonist is haunted by 1930s ghosts, who are themselves “haunted” (metaphorically) by a series of events in the 1920s that motivated the murderer. It is essentially three stories in one, two of them historical, and my protagonist travels in time as she moves through the rooms of the hotel, encountering the past in a very literal sense. In a way, it’s the epic quest story I always wanted to write, just on a much smaller scale!

I had a lovely time selling, signing, and meeting readers at the Book Extravaganza in Coventry at the weekend. After my trip to Glasgow I’m staying home for a little while to actually get some writing done! But I will be doing more book fairs across Birmingham, Cirencester, and Coventry next year, so keep an eye on this newsletter for more details as they come up. I have lots of exciting plans for next year – I just need to remind myself to keep my ambitions realistic!

My main dilemma this month has been deciding on the theme for the fourth collection. It’s really important for short story collections to have some kind of theme, and while mine are obviously all held together by the basic category of “ghost stories”, they still need something else to give each collection a sense of coherence. As they are collections of stories told on the Creepy Classics podcast, my method for choosing stories is also a bit of a mix of collecting together what I have into a sensible, coherent group, but also being able to deliberately write some fresh stories to go with them – both for upcoming podcast episodes, and for the one book-exclusive story I include in each book.

My first two collections were very straightforward in theme, as I simply grouped them roughly by historical period. More or less, anyway – the second, Ghost Stories from Ancient Greece, has a lot of Greek myth retellings in it, which don’t really have a firm historical period to fit them into!

But my bestseller at in person events is my third collection, which is a bit different. The main theme in Haunting Tales for Winter is Christmas – the stories go back in time from the Regency period, through Reformation Scotland, medieval France, and the non-historical setting of King Arthur’s court, back to Viking Age Iceland. I actually sold out of copies of this one when I took it to a Halloween Craft Fair a couple of weeks back, which was great!

Chatting with readers, I felt like there were a few things about this third book that appealed to them the most:

· The Christmas setting

· The idea of the stories going backwards through time

· The known quantity that is a King Arthur story (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, to be precise)

· The Regency stories (for some)

· The Viking Age stories (for some)

So then, of course, I got in my head and got into a flap about what theme I should choose for my next collection!

The plan was to continue with my loose groupings of historical periods and make the next volume Creepy Classics: Medieval Ghost Stories. I have a few of these in hand, will write some more over the winter, and it makes a coherent series with the first two.

But for a brief time, I wondered if I should do something different, something that might appeal to readers more and that would be less dry than the basic “division by historical period” that my historian brain defaults to! I thought about choosing themes relating to the type of ghost story included, like “haunted houses” – but quickly realised that I didn’t have enough stories of any one particular type (that I hadn’t already included in volumes 1-3, which have several haunted house stories!). Then I wondered if I should continue with the seasonal theme of the third book, and do Haunting Tales for Spring/Summer/Autumn. But I had a couple of concerns with that one. For one thing, I get the fewest sales on Ghost Stories From Ancient Greece, which was the book I advertised with the tagline, “A Beach Read with a Difference!”, so while there are some readers who like hot, summery ghost stories, they may be in a minority! And for another, while I could identify stories with a strongly felt summer or autumn setting, spring ones were harder. The setting might be there, but it was less integral to the story than the Christmas setting is to the stories in the third book. And some stories take places across multiple seasons!

In the end, I decided to stick to Medieval Ghost Stories for book four, but I am taking two things away from my chats with readers about the third. First, the cover story is going to be the story of ‘Robin Hood’s Death,’ which I told on the podcast last summer. Like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, this is an immediately recognisable context that gives readers a good idea of what to expect.

And second, I will probably put the stories in chronological order, taking readers forwards through time instead of backwards. While it’s easy to picture “medieval” as meaning the Later Medieval Period, the period actually stretches across a thousand years, and my stories come from all over Europe. So we will start in very early medieval Italy, barely out of the Roman Empire, and travel through Viking Age Iceland (again – they are a great source for ghost stories!) and Robin Hood’s England, going at least up to England in the later medieval period, following the catastrophe of the Black Death. Hopefully this will have some of the same appeal as the journey through Christmases past in Haunting Tales for Winter!

I haven’t completely decided on the theme for the fifth collection yet, but at the moment it is likely to be Georgian Ghost Stories. This is another case where my historian brain keeps picking holes in the concept that really don’t need to be picked! I have a few stories set in the Regency period, and some a little earlier – the Georgian era in British history covers 1714-1837, so that’s fine, and while it’s a shame not to keep it to the Regency, I think “Georgian” still works.

But of course, not all my stories are set in Britain! A few years back I told the story of the vampire Arnold Paole, which takes place in Serbia. So of course, my pedantic, technical brain rebels at the idea of including it in a collection of “Georgian” stories because it’s not British and it doesn’t come under that label. But I can’t think of an alternative that would clearly express to readers in one or two words that the stories are from Europe in the 18^th and early 19^th centuries!

What do you think? Can I include stories from other parts of Europe under the label “Georgian”, in the same way people often use “Victorian” for places outside of Britain? Let me know!

I’ll be selling and signing books at the Coventry Book Extravaganza in the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry on Saturday 15^th November, so do come by and say hi if you’re in the area! After that I’ll be staying home for a while to focus on writing, content creation, and lecturing – I’ll be out and about with the Book Extravaganza team again next spring.