BSFA award 2024 shortlist

You don’t get many days like last Thursday. I mean, it was February 29th, so obviously… but, aside from that, it was the official release day for Charlie Says. And it was the day that Andrew Wilson and I finalised the Table of Contents for our Nova Scotia 2 anthology, which we are very excited […]

Kind Words

As a writer, any time someone says something nice about your work, you get a little glow. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been in the game, there are always inner insecurities and a little bit of external validation adds a welcome handful of kindling to the campfire of self belief and pushes the darkness […]

Charlie Says

I have a new book out soon. It’s a short, snappy novella about ritualising risk and courting controversy to attain the things we want, and it’s called Charlie Says. That title might sound familiar to readers of a certain age. Was anyone who grew up in the 1970s and 80s not scarred by the public […]

2023 ROUNDUP

This year ended up being a productive one, all things considered. I definitely feel like I’ve rediscovered the ability to get into a regular creative routine again. Partly that’s due to returning to working in the office two days a week, reclaiming the potential for cafe writing that’s lost when I work from home. It […]

Keepsakes and Hand-me-downs

Over the last few months I’ve been writing a bunch of new short stories. All are loosely in the horror or weird fiction genres, but that’s not the only link between them. Each tale also includes a bequest or inheritance. I’ve been thinking a lot about the things that are passed down through the generations. […]

BSFA award 2023 shortlist

Unbelievably proud to discover that my story, A Moment Of Zugzwang, has been voted on to the British Science Fiction Association award shortlist for 2023. It’s a massive priviledge to share the nomination with four other hugely talented authors. A Moment Of Zugzwang is one of my near future surveillance bees stories (a series that […]

2022 Roundup

Well, 2022 is almost done. In some ways, I suppose, it’s been a more hopeful year, though at the same time it’s managed to find new challenges to throw our way too. It feels at least like the world is moving again. Likewise, creatively, I feel like this has been a year of scraping off […]

back in black static

Just heard from Andy Cox that my story, The Salted Bones, is going to be in issue 82/83 of Black Static. I’m especially pleased about this because Andy has been kind enough to publish my stories since issue 2 of The Third Alternative (the precursor to Black Static), and this final issue marks his publishing […]

A love of location

Location and landscape are some of my favourite parts of a book. I don’t just mean pretty descriptions and lovely nature writing. The best locations are the bedrock of the story. They reflect the theme and have a key role to play in the story. Very often they’re as memorable as the characters themselves. The […]

Amaze Your Friends

Hey, so for the third year in a row, I’ve succeed in getting my musical shit together enough to release a new Disappointed Skeptics Club album. It’s called Amaze Your Friends and contains eight brand new songs about magic, misdirection and the power of belief (and disbelief). As before, all of the songs were written […]