Exploring a Sleep-Deprived Nightmare Cult in Scotland

Plus don't miss the Northern Publishers' Fair for 2024!

Good morning Scribblers,

Last Friday author Elliot J Harper and I headed to The Grove Bookshop in Ilkley for an evening of genre fiction.

Debuting our new banner! It was brilliant to see our publisher table of the month in action. Elliot said that he first met me and was introduced to FOTW via our Northern Publishers’ Fair (and later submitted his novel ‘New Gillion Street’! Indeed the fair is a fab way of meeting 16 northern publishers and networking, so if you’re free on Sat 27th of April…

Free tickets (and goodie FOTW Tote bag tickets - about 9 left) available here. Turn up any time.

Today I’m handing over to Stirling novelist and creative writing lecturer, Liam Bell, to talk about location and atmosphere in psychological thriller ‘The Sleepless’. How do we decide where to set our writing - and how can setting become an integral element of the plot, creating tension and conflict?

What if I told you that sleep was just a habit? What if the third of your life you spend asleep, you could be awake instead?

Grafton is a single dad who works in local radio, but he’s always dreamt of being a ‘real’ journalist. When he gets a whiff of a story – a Scottish commune whose residents believe that sleep is a social construct – he decides to investigate… something tells him ‘the Sleepless’ might finally provide answers about his wife, Liz, who abandoned him and their son Isaac for a similar cult in India.

As Grafton is drawn deeper into the extreme world of the Sleepless, Liz reappears, and Grafton has to race to save both himself and his son…

“I wrote the majority of my fourth novel, The Sleepless, during the first UK lockdown. It’s a thriller centred on a commune whose disciples believe that we’re too dependent on sleep and that we can train ourselves to survive on less. In terms of the setting, I knew two things: firstly, the commune would need to be somewhere isolated enough for the cult to conduct their business unhindered; and, secondly, that with me confined indoors whilst writing, it needed to be somewhere that I knew intimately.