Silvergold bright and edgechill

My favourite season has always been autumn. On a bright September or October morning, I love the balance between sun warmth and air chill, an excuse to pull on a jumper and enjoy the caress of wool. And I love the clarity of the light, not slow and honeyed like a summer morning, but gimlet […]

Writer’s Holiday

Everyone knows that writers don’t take holidays. Their brains just aren’t wired that way. They’re always switched on, receptive to ideas and chewing them into the building blocks of stories. The problem for many writers, in fact, is having enough time in their lives to get those stories written down, in words, on screens, and […]

Working music

There are two types of writer: those who find it difficult to write with music on, and those who find it difficult to write without it. From the former group, the most common complaint is that music is a distraction: that it disrupts their ability to concentrate on the rhythm of the prose, that they need […]

Dead Darlings

When I began the project I’m editing at the moment, there was one scene that for me summed up perfectly what I wanted the story to be about. It was the heart and the touchstone. It was the workings of the whole thing in microcosm. And it was literally the first thing I wrote when […]

Turn, and look again

One of the best pieces of writing advice I know is to give yourself perspective on anything you write. Once it is finished, stick it away in a box for a week, a month, however long, and then go back and read it again with new eyes; as a reader would. This is wonderful advice […]

In praise of Tessa Kum, Freelance Editor

I’m in the middle of doing some editing work on a novel project which involves sorting out some plot issues and reducing down the overall wordage and I decided to get some outside feedback. Normally I’d be more than happy to put projects like this before the membership of GSFWC, but on this occasion I […]

Voice

My friend, Michaela Staton, posted a very sweet tweet yesterday in response, I think, to having read Lost Sheep in the new Dark Currents anthology. The tweet was a compliment and delightful to receive, but I’ve been thinking quite deeply about the implications of it. Michaela said that what she liked about my writing was: […]

Headers versus Hearters

*Scene: the classroom in the Peanuts cartoons. At the front, the ever-incoherent teacher. Facing her, a column of kids at desks: Lucy, Patty, Charlie B, and at the back, wearing a dunce hat, a bemused looking kid, slightly older than the rest, who we learn is called Neil. The deployment of dunce hats is not […]

Cafe culture

It seems I have become conditioned to cafe culture. At least from a writing point of view. I’m thinking of this for two reasons. The first is because I took a few days off work a week or so ago, a Wednesday to Friday stretch that added to the weekend gave me five full uninterrupted […]

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 […]