My favourite thing…

…in Interzone 220 was Rick Kleffel’s excellent interview with Jeffrey Ford. My favourite Ford novel is still The Portrait Of Mrs Charbuque (and my favourite story is still “Creation”), but I’m thinking of giving The Physiognomy et al another read. And of course picking up copies of The Drowned Life and The Shadow Year as […]

New Wexler

One writer who never seems to publish enough is Robert Freeman Wexler. His subtley side-swiped realities never fail to entertain. Well, now, hot on the heels of his excellent collection Psychological Methods To Sell Should Be Destroyed, we can look forward to a surfeit of new Wexler in the near future. Not only have PS […]

Book Learning

So, after a somewhat intense last few weeks, I finally finished the rewrite of TMK. It’s been a long and much-interrupted process, and one which I’ve found massively frustrating, but from the point of view at least of professional development, it’s been pretty useful. Actually, scratch that: it’s been kinda fucking necessary on account of […]

New books

Just arrived this morning: Tales Of The Ten Lost Tribes by Tamar Yellin The Engine’s Child by Holly Phillips Fast Ships, Black Sails by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer I’ve been looking forward to all three of these for *ages*. So much so that I forgot to actually order them until last week. All I need […]

In with the New/Ain’t no lie

Conventions. I love them. They come at just the right times to wrench you out of the workaday and let you just hang out with your friends in a bar, for three or four days. Usually, I do two a year. Eastercon at, well, Easter, and Fantasycon in September. Occasionally, if I’m feeling flush I […]

Tomorrow Elephant…next week, The World!

Those of you who have been enjoying Hannu Rajaniemi’s beautiful, compacted, effervescent jewel-like short stories in Nova Scotia, and the most recent issue of Interzone, will be as excited as I am to hear that he’s just secured himself a whopping three book deal with Gollancz. How exciting is that?

The Short Stuff

Must be the time of year, but for some reason I’ve been innundated with new short fiction to read, and I don’t know where to start to enjoy it all. TTA Press’s usual bi-monthly swaparama of Interzone and Black Static have been supplemented by the latest Crimewave, which is always cause for celebration. From PS, […]

Untinted spectacles

Unlike many who write genre fiction, I didn’t grow up reading the stuff. Don’t know, it just never appealed to me. My loss, I guess, but one benefit it has left me with is the distinct lack of rose in my spectrum when viewing the older works in the genre. When I first joined GSFWC […]

AbFab Whitby

So, over the weekend the postman dropped a very welcome jiffy bag on my mat. It was something I’ve been looking forward to for a fair while now, and I’m delighted to announce the arrival of Fabulous Whitby. This is the second in what looks hopefully like it might be a series of short story […]

It lives…again!

The print edition of The Ephemera’s pretty much impossible to get hold of now, but if you missed it don’t fret. By the miracle of modern technology, you can now download it as an e-book from Fictionwise. I’ve mentioned before that I’m interested in seeing how the e-book market develops, so I’m treating this as […]