Like the previous three books, Writing The Magic is a collection of thirteen essays on the craft of writing – not a ‘how to’ book as such, but a group of different experiences and approaches to suggest different ways of going about your writing. The largest section is on worldbuilding, with essays by Jen Williams, Jeff Noon and Alex Pheby – this seemed essential for any book on writing Fantasy – but we also have the usual spotlight pieces (on Tolkien, Le Guin and Moorcock this time), as well as some more general essays and deep-dives on dragons and children’s books.

It’s interesting, because while it’s the fourth book in the series, this one has been in the works since we released Writing The Uncanny. Doing events for that book, the first question everyone asked was: when will you do one on Fantasy? We’d already committed to tackling Science Fiction next in Writing The Future, however, and after that we wanted to move away from speculative fiction for a while – hence Writing The Murder. But the fourth book was always going to be our Fantasy book.

We actually keep the remit fairly loose for this series, and in many ways it’s more like commissioning short stories – writers are free to tackle whatever topic they find interesting, and then afterwards we find a way to make them all work together! For this particular book, I’ve had two writers comment already that it was nice to be able to tackle Fantasy as a subject for serious study, instead of the rather surface treatments that we’ve seen of the genre in the past. That’s generally the response that we get – authors are usually very keen to think about and discuss their craft.

Like the other books in the series, Writing The Magic makes a virtue out of highlighting a range of different responses and approaches to the genre. For me, I felt this even more so than I did with Writing The Uncanny or Writing The Future. Is Fantasy a particularly varied or contentious genre? (I’m also willing to accept that maybe I’m just super opiniated about Fantasy!)

There was a quite widely discussed disagreement in Writing The Future (about whether sci-fi should try to predict the future or not), which made me realise that this is actually an intrinsic part of our approach with these books. There is no single right way to write a book, and any approach that claims to know the one way to approach it is probably misleading you. It’s all about trying different things, taking advice, and then working out what works for you. The biggest disagreement in this volume is over worldbuilding – should worlds be planned out in advance in intricate detail, or is it more productive to make it up as you go along and fix the inconsistencies in the edit? And as I’ve just said, I don’t think there’s a simple answer to that question. It’s more about finding what works for you – hopefully Writing The Magic can give you some new perspectives on that, and help you find a better way of writing that fits your own style and aspirations.

The most difficult part is always deciding who to leave out. I’d have loved to have a piece on Pratchett in Writing The Magic, for example, but we had to choose three and he just didn’t make the cut. It’s always a bit of a balancing act, too, between including those who absolutely have to be there (it’s hard to imagine this book without Tolkien, for example) and yet keeping the door open to some slightly more interesting or idiosyncratic choices. This time around, I suspect my own tastes drove the decisions – Melniboné, Earthsea and Middle-earth were the cornerstones of my childhood reading. I also think Michael Moorcock is the first living writer we’ve included, which felt like a big decision – but it’s hard to imagine Grimdark existing without him.

Those lists are a labour of love! It’s sometimes a struggle to come up with a hundred must-read titles, and we’ll be scrabbling around for more books that we can add, asking the contributors for their own favourites so we can include those – and then all of a sudden we have far too many, and we have to make some quite harsh cuts. Generally speaking, we try to keep the list varied, with some obvious classics but also some forgotten gems, and a good spread across the entire time period. It’s crazy how often one particular year will see five or six classics of the genre being published, and we try to trim those a little. Hopefully, at the end, we have a list that will be of interest to both the newcomer and the long-term reader.

There are certainly some essays that could just as easily have appeared in other books. RJ Barker’s in Writing The Magic, for example, will offer valuable advice to anyone looking to write as a career, whether Fantasy is their genre of choice or not. It’s all about getting that balance right, though – some of the more ‘deep-dive’ pieces (Charlotte Bond’s on using dragons in your fiction, for example) are fairly specific. What we’ve found is that there are readers who just like reading about the act of writing, so the genre isn’t always important – while for other people, genre is everything.

That’s a tough one, because I don’t want to give too much away. There should be an announcement early next year… but suffice it to say that we’re not finished yet!

Increasingly, I find that my own interests lie on the borderlines between genres, sometimes in genre mashups (such as scifi-horror), but more often in those slightly undefinable stories that are their own unique thing. One way or another, I basically work on books full-time now – and after a while the familiar tropes become a little too obvious. It’s been noted by more than one reviewer that my short stories often take an unexpected swerve partway through, taking the reader to places they never saw coming – and for me that’s something I always aspire to.

2026 is set to be my busiest year yet, with (I think) six books coming out! My collection Come Sing for the Harrowing, which had a very limited release in 2024 before the publisher closed their doors, will be reissued in April by CLASH Books in a brand-new edition with a couple of new stories. There’s also a forthcoming collection of my non-genre stories. As for anthologies, nothing has been announced yet but there are a couple in the second half of the year, plus two non-fiction books (including a new one in the ‘Writing…’ series). Watch this space!