Dialogue is not a function of what the character sees in front of them. It's a function of what they are feeling (and are motivated by) from the inside. So if another character is lying injured in front of them, the knee-jerk dialogue might be: "Are you OK?" or "Do you need a doctor?" But this is writing 'outside in'. The inside out dialogue is based on how the character is feeling about themselves. NOW their dialogue will reflect that exposure/vulnerability: "Fuck, fuck, FUUUUCK!!!" You will not write fine dialogue until you get behind the eyes of the speaker, feel what they are feeling, and lock on to their (deeply ego-driven - especially under pressure) motivation.

There is a particular kind of British fiction that takes the absurdity of the present moment and makes it funnier, darker, and more uncomfortably recognisable than the news ever manages. Paul Carroll writes that kind of fiction. His debut novel, Shaking Hands with Elvis, imagined a privatised assisted dying clinic open for business after the government sold off the NHS. His follow-up, Be Here Now, turns the same satirical precision on music festivals, corporate greenwashing, and the Oasis reunion as cultural spectacle - a one-off gig on a wind turbine eco-island, billed as the greenest live music event of all time, attended by middle-aged Manc mates trying to recapture their youth and activists who have other plans entirely. Two novels. Two targets. The same sharp, unsentimental eye. We are proud to publish Paul Carroll. Both titles are available now in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook. Link in bio.

An agent rejected your manuscript. Not because it was poorly written. Because they could not find you online. This is not speculation - it is how literary representation actually works in 2026. Before an agent reads a single page, they search your name. What they find (or do not find) shapes everything that follows. A strong manuscript from an invisible author is, from the industry's perspective, a risk they do not need to take. DreamEngine Publishing was built around this reality. We are a selective independent UK publisher that combines professional publication with the Author Mythology framework - a strategic approach to building the author platform that traditional publishing demands but does nothing to help you create. Our authors are published to full professional standards: editorial, design, metadata, distribution. They also work with us to construct the platform identity, positioning, and visibility that makes their publication count beyond the book itself. For many of our authors, DreamEngine publication is the foundation from which agent representation becomes a realistic next step. We review manuscripts from serious authors. We are selective, and that selectivity is part of what we offer - an acceptance from DreamEngine is a statement about the work. @StoryMeBad @realdeville1963

Knowledge Gap There is another thing I have learnt from David Baboulene @StoryMeBad. It is a learning I immediately grasped. And have been unable to ignore ever since. Nowadays – post Bab, as I like to term it – I can hardly watch a film without seeking it out. Much less remain connected to a book without it. There was a building at the edge of the airbase that had no business being there. It stood alone in a wide expanse of scuffed desert sand. Soldiers visited it every day: rifles at the shoulder, eyes pressed to battle sights, moving in a fast half-crouch. No one explained what it was for. I watched it for weeks. By rights its pale walls should have had like properties on either side. A dusty tarmac road should have flanked it. Children should have played on carefully tended lawns. Instead it sat surrounded by aircraft noise and the endless traffic of a military base, its plywood walls shifting uneasily in the heat, its loosely hinged doors creaking and slamming. The visits were choreographed. A nod, a hand on a shoulder, the occasional whispered word. Night and day, day after day. Then one afternoon two helicopters hovered at altitude and a column of parachutists dropped in a perfect double line. They landed, shed their chutes, and joined the dance without breaking stride. A few weeks later the activity stopped. A day after that, the building was dismantled. The walls came down. The doors were taken away. The desert reclaimed the sand as if nothing had ever stood there. Then on the screens in the canteen, over lunch, a news bulletin. A terrorist leader killed in a strike somewhere not far away. Aerial photographs of the house in which he had detonated a bomb. Still on fire. Smoke pouring through holes where windows and doors had been. The house looked strangely familiar. On either side, similar properties. Around it, a dusty tarmac road, parked cars, emerald lawns tended by careful hands. The building at the edge of the airbase had been a replica. A literary agent once returned one of my manuscripts with a single line. She didn't connect with my writing. At the time I filed it under brutal and moved on. Now I know exactly what she meant. The knowledge gap is the engine of narrative. The question the reader does not know they are asking. Hemingway understood it perfectly. "For sale, baby shoes, never worn." Six words. The story they force the reader to construct is devastating precisely because it is never told. The gap is the story. I had been writing without it. Hundreds of thousands of words, adding material, tweaking, turning things up and down, without understanding what was actually missing. The agent knew within seconds. More on that next time. JDV

I came to writing by accident. Divorce first, then the army. I hammered out thousands of words of self-pitying prose in the cold interior of a yacht, then spent years writing intelligence reports in a portacabin in Kurdistan. Neither taught me how to write a story. Divorce was the first spur. Sitting in the frigid interior of the yacht to which life had temporarily banished me, hammering away at an old laptop, hurling my prose at the fates. It was, at least, a catharsis. The volume of self-pitying poison I eventually produced is something I would rather forget. The army helped me back onto my feet. It threw an awkwardly avuncular arm about my shoulders and despatched me shivering in the bowels of vast aircraft to places most people would struggle to find on a map. Hours in seats made of cargo netting, the roar of engines drowning thought. The dim glow of phones lighting the faces of the soldiers around me. Military intelligence is rarely the dark art Hollywood would like it to be. In my experience it was backstopped by uncomfortable beds, wearying hours and, occasionally, time spent ferreting information from the strangest of corners. Kurdistan. A village barely a hundred miles from the Iranian border. A nearly five-tonne civilian armoured Toyota, its white flanks thick with mud, parked akimbo on an uneven street. Dark-faced men in the broad sashes and turbans of their tradition. A café a hundred yards away where two men sat in deep conversation with a local leader. Glock 19s in their waistbands, a round in each chamber, Glock's clever trigger-mounted safety doing its quiet work. Assault rifles under a blanket in the boot, three hundred rounds alongside them, encrypted phones in their pockets. The meeting produced a report. Worked up in an ageing portacabin, the author propped on threadbare pillows leaning against a filthy wall. Clothes drying on makeshift lines overhead. Weapons resting against what might generously be described as wardrobes. The words stripped of emotion, of character, of anything resembling beauty. Structured within rigid guidelines. Gleaming with military precision. As dry as a Walkers crisp. It was, nonetheless, writing. It refined the mechanics. Reinforced the essential discipline of actually sitting down and producing the thing. But staring at the contrast between that armoured Toyota and the sleepy Kurdish village around it, something else began to move. Western military might, parked on a third-world street in the rain. A metaphor for everything. It sparked a creative urge of an entirely different kind. The problem was I still had no idea how to write a story. That took another decade of trial and considerable error. And even when my most honest friends conceded that what I had laboriously produced was worth the read, it remained nowhere near good enough for the most discerning audience of all: the literary agent. For that, I needed to be taught. And as luck would have it, I stumbled across a certain Mr David Baboulene, and the rather clever people at DreamEngine. More on that next week.

We are very happy to welcome Julian DeVille to the DreamEngine author family. Please take a moment follow Julian, you will not regret it!