Infinity Plus Plus

News from Keith Brooke that Infinity Plus Books have revamped their website. It’s all sexy and easy to browse now, and displays a really impressive roster of authors and books. If you’re a Brooke fan or a fan of Eric Brown, IP is pretty much the go-to-place for their work. Likewise, as a long time admirer […]

The Moon King : Cover

Half a year has gone since I got the news that NewCon Press wanted to publish The Moon King. Gone. Like that *snaps fingers*. Half a year left to go before we launch it at Eastercon in Glasgow. But for those that can’t wait a mere click of the fingers (or six months, whichever is […]

The Late Next Big Thing

Towards the end of last year a meme flurried through the writing community called The Next Big Thing. The point of it was to allow folks to wax a little about their newest project and, by name checking other writers to take part, share the boost a little. Nice idea, and I enjoyed reading about […]

The Moon King

I’m overjoyed to announce that my first novel, The Moon King, has been sold by my agent, John Jarrold to Ian Whates of the excellent Newcon Press. The book will be published in hardback, paperback and ebook formats in April 2014. I’m proud of this book. It’s my first attempt at a novel and it’s taken a […]

Score card 2012

Okay, so it’s January, which means, as I sorta promised last year, it’s time to see how I got on with my rather ambitious goals for 2012. In summary I hoped to: Novels: Finish Queen Of Clouds and have started The Poisoner’s Road Shorts: Write and publish 10 short stories Band: Release 2 or 3 […]

Turning back to black

Yet another maundering on horror fiction, this time occasioned by my finishing the first horror novel in years that I’d say, on balance, I both enjoyed and found mostly successful. The book in question was Adam Nevill’s award-winning, The Ritual, and…yeah, interesting. I’m not going to go into a whole of detail here, but will touch […]

September reading

Decent haul on the reading front this month. The novel for September was one Ian R McLeod’s Wake Up And Dream, a book I’d bought almost a year ago, read (and loved) part of and then had to put down for non-reading reasons. I then waited for a suitable period of quietness that’d allow me […]

They shoot talking horses, don’t they?

So this year’s Clarke award short list has caused a bit of a stooshie. It always does, it’s that kind of an award although, in the past, it used be complaints about books from non-genre publishers sneaking into the ghetto party; now it seems to be the other way around. I’ve no intention of going near […]

Iain Rowan’s One Of Us

He is you know, but One Of Us is also the title of Iain’s debut novel. Regular visitors to this part of the internet can’t have escaped the occasional bouts of Rowan-mania that erupt here. I love Iain’s prose, and even though his work is largely classified as crime fiction, I love the margin-treading his stories […]

Tying it all together

Finally, after a lot of replotting and revisioning, I’m at that stage with the novel where I’m attempting to pull all of the various story threads together into something resembling a neat conclusion. As of the latest revisions there are eleven main plot elements that somehow need to be gathered and tied and trimmed into […]