Partly political

I’m not, by nature, a political person. I’ve got views and I vote accordingly but I don’t get all worked about it. However, like many people up here, I find myself getting increasingly engaged politically right now. Because there’s a vote coming up in September and a decision to be made. A poll last year […]

BSFA awards 2014

Over the last few years, in the interests both of keeping up to date with what’s new and good and being a responsible voter, I’ve attempted to read all the fiction nominees for the BSFA awards. I’ve had varying degrees of success. Sometimes I’ve read some of the novels already, other years I’ve got five […]

SWC talk

The excellent Gareth Vile, has kindly plugged my talk on music and writing for the Scottish Writers Centre which takes place at the CCA in Glasgow next Tuesday, 9th April. The talk will encompass short story writing and song writing, the rhythm of prose and writing to music, musical theatre, cabaret, stories about music and […]

Solaris Rising : favourite short stories

Over on the Solaris Editors’ blog, they’re celebrating the release this week of Solaris Rising 2 by asking the people involved in the anthology to talk about their favourite Science Fiction short stories. Mine went up today.

WP > FB android app problem

For general information that may be useful to anyone that publishes WordPress blogs to Facebook. There’s a problem with the way the latest update of the Facebook Android app deals with blog links. It seems to lose the link and diverts to the general WordPress app support page. This problem doesn’t exist when clicking the […]

Seven things I learned in Canada

I understand the principle of air conditioning, but I don’t like hotel rooms where that’s the only option for controlling the temperature. Windows that don’t open drive me nuts. I should try to do a little more research before settling on my travel dates. I think I might have rescheduled a tiny bit to catch […]

Three things

In the last week I’ve done three things I’d never expected to do in my life. Two of them I enjoyed immensely, one of them went against every fibre of my soul. On Thursday, I was Maid-Of-Honor at my friend’s civil partnership wedding. It was a beautiful day, overflowing with love, and best of all […]

Ahabs

I wasn’t going to comment on the ongoing palaver that arose during and since the Eastercon awards ceremony. I think all that could possibly be said about that misjudged introductory speech must have been by now. So this post isn’t about that speech. It is however about the reaction to it. And I wouldn’t even […]

The Seven R’s (or Eight, or Nine)

For all my artistic ambitions as declared so forthrightly last month, there was always going to come a point where all the various things that demand energy were going to clash, leading ultimately to failure to really progress much of note. This week I have been Revising the final draft of the current day job project […]

Hal Reads

Hal Duncan fans who’ve been missing their fix lately (I hear he’s busy writing a novel!), might like to click over to youtube and watch the arch word scamp himself reading from his recent story “Styx Water And A Sippy Cup”. (Hey, I think I spot one of the Pinata Of Apocalypse in the background […]