Some time ago, I built myself a new desk.
Not from a flat-pack, or from anything particularly new and fancy. I started with an old set of change-table drawers that had been sitting in storage since my youngest was out of nappies.
They no longer suited the purpose they had been made for, but the pieces themselves were still useful. So I cut them down, reshaped them and built something that fits the life I have now.
While I was working, I kept thinking about how much the process felt like writing.
The pieces we inherit
Most stories don’t begin with something completely new.
They begin with fragments: an old myth, a moment in history, a familiar character shape, a question that refuses to leave you alone. Sometimes they begin with the part of an inherited story that never quite made sense—or with a voice that was pushed to the edge of it.
Those pieces already have shapes of their own. They carry memories, assumptions and the marks of the purposes they once served.
The challenge isn’t to pretend none of that exists. It’s to look carefully at what is already there and ask what it might become.
What still works? What needs to be cut away? Which pieces can be turned around and seen differently? Where is there room to build something the original shape was never designed to hold?
That, for me, is where much of the craft lives.
Two corners of the forge
It’s probably why mythology and history keep finding their way into my books.
The Borderlands of Britannia begins with real history: Roman-occupied Britain, the construction of Hadrian’s Wall, and the uneasy places where Roman and Briton, empire and land, history and mythology meet.
Writing within that world means working with pieces that have a stubborn grain. There are fixed points in the historical record, cultures with their own beliefs and obligations, and landscapes that cannot be treated as empty scenery.
Claimed by Fate comes at the work from another direction. Those stories lean further into myth, folklore and darker fairytale shapes. They are interested in transformation, dangerous bargains, and people discovering that the roles handed to them are not the only roles they can inhabit.
One series asks what happens where histories, cultures and gods collide. The other keeps returning to questions about monsters: who names them, who benefits from that naming, and what might happen when the monster refuses to remain inside the old story.
They are different corners of the forge, but the work begins in much the same way—with old pieces and the possibility of another shape.
Building what is needed now
Reworking something old doesn’t mean erasing where it came from.
My desk doesn’t look like a change table anymore, but that earlier life hasn’t vanished. It survives in the material, in the dimensions of the drawers, and in the small practical decisions I had to make while turning it into something else.
Stories can carry their earlier shapes in the same way.
A myth can remain recognisable while asking a different question. A historical setting can retain its boundaries while making room for lives the surviving records barely noticed. A familiar monster can step out of the role it was given and reveal that the old version was never the whole story.
The pieces may be old. What we need from them now may not be.
Perhaps that is what the Story-Forge means to me: not creating from nothing, but paying attention to what has endured, then doing the patient work of giving it a shape that belongs to the story being made today.
And now that I have somewhere to sit, I should probably get back to making it.