The Milford committee has kicked around the idea of a writers’ retreat before, but this year we finally got around to organising one when we received an email from Trigonos advertising their spare winter dates. There was an enticing six day period from Sunday 25th Feb to Saturday 3rd March, and we snapped it up.

Trigonos is pretty well perfect for a retreat. It’s not just the setting, which is gorgeous, but also the ambiance. Ensuite rooms with writing tables, a lovely library (with an open fire) for communal chat, excellent food, and a ‘we’re here to help, but we’ll leave you alone if that’s what you want’ kind of attitude. After the evening meal the staff all go home and we’re left to our own devices, so it’s very homely.

Breakfast at eight, coffee and biscuits at eleven, lunch at one (with delicious home made soup). Four p.m. is…

Earlier this week I was asked a question which may evoke a wry smile amongst fellow writers: ‘Where do you get your ideas?’I will be honest: my usual response to this old chestnut of a question tends towards glibness.

Sometimes I quote a response attributed to Asimov: ‘I just leave out milk and cookies overnight, and in the morning the milk and cookies are gone and there’s an idea there.’ Or, to put it another way, buggered if I know.

Sometimes I quote the late great Sir Terry Pratchett: ‘I don’t know where ideas come from but I know there they go: they go to my desk, and if I’m not there, they go away again.’ Or, to put it another way: what appears to have happened by magic to you, dear reader, is actually the product of a lot of hard work.

But this question was asked with…

‘Transdimensional’ by Phil Jones

In the spirit of Vector’s traditional “Best of” print edition, which is nearly ready, here is our pick of science news for 2017.

First of all, water. Two new inventions for increasing the supply of drinking water caught our eye:

• one, using a graphene-enhanced membrane for desalination 
• and another, using sunlight in a device that pulls water out of the air.

In other exciting news regarding fluids, albeit less immediately applicable: scientists have made a fluid with negative mass. But then, the usefulness of inventions is often hard to judge.

The New York Times is not a place where one expects to find encounters between the Navy and UFOs, but the NYT in 2017 has been a place to rival any dystopian SF. Therefore, it has been worth the extra effort to look for technoscience news which seemed less likely to transform our world in…

Writers all over the world talk about Imposter Syndrome*, that feeling your success is undeserved and that one day the world will collectively blink, take a good long look at you and realise you are some kind of fraud.

It’s something that affects people in many walks of life, creative or not. You would think it should be a simple thing to look at your own achievements and accept the success that years of experience, hard work, and learning, have brought. For many people it’s not always so. I’ll admit to being one of them. I don’t think my writing is good enough, I try with every piece I write to be a better writer. It’s the same with my leather-craft and, even though I can see the results and know I’m getting better, on some days I still feel like I’m an amateur.

I love our garden and…