Once upon a stormy Halloween, Val and I stumbled upon the spookiest short story yet in the Mariana Enriquez book we’ve been reading. A few hours earlier, I’d also had the unexpected joy of picking up the new remaster of The Wolf Among Us.

Halfway through the beautiful opening credits, I once again realized how those original episodes had been one of the biggest influences on the fiction I tried to write between 2013 and 2016 (a whole cemetery of short stories and first chapters of novels), and how traces of that influence can still be felt today, in the bits of scenes I’ve been slowly writing for Paperbacks.

I’d be happy to capture a fraction of that great pacing, dialogue and sense of mystery in my writing – as happy as I’ll be playing an episode a day… before our trip to Spain.