Queen Of Clouds – Published Today!

Queen of Clouds is officially published today. I can’t tell you how that feels. Honestly, there’s nothing like the pleasure of seeing That Book What You Wrote actually existing in the world as a thing of paper and ink (and pixels). It never, ever, gets old. I’m massively indebted to Ian Whates and NewCon Press […]

2021 Roundup

Another barmy year, eh? A year of obsessively watching trends and numbers and graphs, of living carefully and hopefully. A year of feeling that life was getting back to normal, until it wasn’t. Another year of losing friends. And of doing the only thing a creative person can do, get the head down and continue […]

2018 Roundup

Time for the annual yearly roundup again and, wow, I have to tell you 2018 was an utter git of a year for achieving those artistic aims. For a variety of reasons, finding the time, energy and focus for writing and music was a struggle. But we all go through those periods and then it […]

The obligatory January thing

It seems to have become the custom that in December I do a round up of the year, and in January I follow it up with a plans-and-expectations spiel. Sometimes I compare the one at the end with the one at the beginning, sometimes I know not to bother. Anyway, welcome to 2016’s now-obligatory January post. […]

The Year of Living Industriously

After all the exciting business of novels and the like last year, 2015 might look like it was a year of not very much happening, but I doubt I’ve ever had such a productive one. Musically, we got the band back on the road and Markee and Bert managed to get themselves on a US […]

How writers write

Every writer has their own unique approach to getting from Idea to Finished Thing. A few weeks I was asked by the SF novelist Tony Ballantyne to describe how I tackle the writing process for a regular feature on his website. If you’re interested in that sort of thing (and you should certainly read Keith Brooke’s […]

November

November has always been a turn-month for me. The step change from October’s sodden leaf-mould underfoot to starry skins of frost, from autumn to winter. A crisp, glittering month. A month of acknowledgement, of reset, of possibility. Over the years, I’ve done much of my best writing work at this time of the year, and this bright (if […]

BlogHop: Three Things I Don’t Write (and Three Things I do)

Another of those writery blog tour things with the twin purposes of providing you with a few titbits of insight into someone whose blog you already read and linking backwards and forwards in the chain to other writers that you might also like. I was tagged for this one by Ruth Booth, by way of Benjanun […]

Writers Blog Tour

This is something that’s been doing the rounds, and I’ve been nominated to take part by the excellent Liz Williams, following on from the equally excellent Claire Weaver. Be sure to link back to their posts and then return here to witness how bizarrely random I am when it comes to writing. 1. What am I working […]

That strange engine of creation

With the bidey-in working away for a few weeks, I have a rare, extended period of solitude at home and had hoped to use the swathes of uninterrupted time to storm ahead on editing the novel. And I am doing so; it’s knitting together better this time round, but progress is slow. Partly this is […]