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What H G Wells Teaches Us – And Why He Stays With You as a Writer

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After spending serious time inside the work of H G Wells – his fiction, his nonfiction, his arguments, his blind spots, and his warnings – a clear picture begins to form. Wells was never trying to predict the future in the way people lazily credit him for. He wasn’t a prophet. He wasn’t playing guessing games with technology or science. He was trying to wake people up in the present. Once you grasp that, everything about Wells shifts. How you read him changes. And more importantly, how you write after him changes too. The first thing you come to understand is that Wells was never interested in comfort. He distrusted easy optimism. He distrusted technological triumphalism. And he deeply distrusted the reassuring idea that progress naturally makes people wiser, kinder, or fairer. Again and again, across novel after novel, he returned to the same unsettling truth – intelligence without responsibility is dangerous, and systems built without moral growth eventually turn against the peopl...
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Sherlock, Doyle, Mediums and Fairies

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  Every serious examination of Conan Doyle eventually has to confront the uncomfortable, fascinating, and frankly wacky truth. The man who gave the world Sherlock Holmes – the supreme apostle of reason, evidence, and rational deduction – ended his life convinced that fairies had been photographed in an English garden, and that the dead were speaking to the living through séances, mediums, and spirit guides. This is not a footnote. It is not a quirky aside. And it is certainly not an embarrassment to be quietly brushed under the carpet by literary critics who would rather keep Doyle neat and respectable. It is central to understanding who Doyle was, what drove him, and why Sherlock Holmes ultimately became a burden rather than a triumph. To understand Doyle properly, we have to follow him to the places where logic failed him – and where grief stepped in to fill the gap. The Seeds Were Always There The popular myth is that Conan Doyle suddenly “lost his mind” late in life. ...
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Entering the Shadowed World of Edgar Allan Poe

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  Welcome to a journey unlike any other you will take as a writer. You are stepping into the flickering candlelight of Edgar Allan Poe’s imagination – a place where shadows breathe, reason trembles, and language becomes a darkly shining instrument of terror, beauty, and revelation. This course is your invitation to walk alongside one of literature’s most enduring and influential architects, a man whose work has shaped horror, mystery, psychological fiction, science fiction, poetry, and even the modern detective story. As you move through the lessons, you will discover not only how Poe wrote, but why he wrote the way he did – the obsessions, the technique, the precision, and the burning need for emotional impact that drove every story, poem, and essay he crafted. This is not a dry academic tour of a long-dead author. It is a living exploration of what made Poe’s writing so powerful that it still grips readers nearly two ce...
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From Fleet Street to Streaming – How True Crime Was Born in the Press and Reborn in the Digital Age

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  Long before podcasts, Netflix documentaries, and global streaming platforms made true crime a permanent fixture of modern culture, the genre was born in the clatter and ink-stains of the daily newspaper. True crime did not begin as a carefully curated narrative art form. It began as sensational press reportage , shaped by deadlines, circulation wars, and the public’s deep, uneasy fascination with violence, mystery, and moral transgression. The dirty secret of the genre is this - true crime did not originate as a literary tradition. It originated as news business . And nowhere is that more visible than in the fog-choked streets of Victorian London in 1888. Jack the Ripper and the Birth of Mass-Market True Crime Jack the Ripper is not just history’s most infamous unidentified serial killer. He is also the moment when true crime, as a public obsession, truly ignited at scale. Before the Ripper, crime reporting existed, of course. Murders, trials, and executions had long b...
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Courtly Love - The Dangerous Poetry of Desire, Duty, and Devotion

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  Courtly love is one of the strangest, most beautiful, and most misunderstood inventions in Western storytelling. It gave us knights who fought not just for kings, but for ladies. It gave us love that could never be fulfilled. It gave us desire that was sworn, not taken. It gave us passion that lived in longing rather than in beds. And long before the modern romance novel, long before Valentine’s Day cards and cinematic love declarations, courtly love was shaping how Western culture imagined devotion, loyalty, seduction, and sacrifice. To understand courtly love is to understand the emotional engine behind the Grail legends, Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere, the poetry of the troubadours, and a vast body of pre-Reformation literature where love was at once sacred, dangerous, and socially disruptive. It is not a cute medieval version of romance. It is a refined emotional weapon disguised as poetry. What Courtly Love Actually Was Courtly love emerged in the high me...
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Write and Profit From Self Help

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  There is a very simple reason people buy self-help books. They want something to change. They want to be happier, richer, calmer, fitter, more confident, more attractive, more productive, more loved, or simply less afraid of the world than they currently are. Sometimes all of the above. Sometimes only one desperate thing. The moment you truly understand that, you understand the entire self-help industry. People are not really buying information. They are buying hope organized into pages. They are buying a mirror that quietly says, “You are not broken - and this can get better.” That is what you are really writing when you write self-help. Not advice. Not formulas. Not tidy solutions. You are writing permission to change. And if you do that honestly, clearly, and with genuine authority, the market will always be there. Before You Write, Read Like a Maniac Before you even think about writing your own self-help book, I want you to do something most beginners avoid. Read the top ...
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Robert Louis Stevenson’s Quiet Rebellion Against Imperial Ideology

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How Treasure Island and Jekyll and Hyde Reveal a Subtle yet Brilliant Anti-Establishment Mind There’s a certain delight in realizing that Robert Louis Stevenson, that supposed spinner of boyish yarns and penny-dreadful shocks, was in fact one of the most subversive moral thinkers of the Victorian age. His stories masquerade as adventure and horror, all the while operating as sly critiques of the very establishment that adored him. If you scratch the bright varnish on Treasure Island , or peer closely at the psycho-moral shadows of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , you begin to see that Stevenson wasn’t simply entertaining the Empire. He was examining it. Questioning it. Needling it. Quietly rebelling against it. To understand the depth of that rebellion, we must start with the world Stevenson inhabited. He came of age in the latter half of the 19th century, during the height of British imperialism. Nelson’s legacy still perfumed the national imagination – the brave admiral wh...
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