Charlie says…hands off!

One of the risks of being the kind of writer who has more ideas than they can focus on at any one time (and that pretty much is *all* writers, right?) is that sooner or later one of your really good back burner ideas will get picked up and used by someone else. Their treatment […]

Cutting room

Heading out in a moment or two for my lunchtime session of “making a long book noticeably shorter”, it strikes me how much I’m enjoying the process. In early drafts my tendency is to sprinkle the words around to make sure I get the atmosphere across or provide a bit of scaffolding for a scene. […]

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 […]

A God Awful Small Affair

So, the news buzzing around the interwebs tonight has been the rumour that the Mars Science Lab analysts are gearing up to make, well, the kind of announcement that we all hope for every time a piece of kit like Curiosity touches down there. Given that the purpose of the MSL is to search for […]

Horror, Eureka!

Earlier this year I was moaning about my dissatisfaction with contemporary horror fiction. It was a bit of an inarticulate thrash around the subject to be honest. I just wasn’t able to put my finger on why I rarely found horror fiction never to be satisfying. Thank goodness, then, for Nina Allen. Over on her […]

Location, location

The last 18 months or so has seen a bunch of film crews dotting around Glasgow making a movies. A combination of our grid-patterned Victorian-era city centre and tax and other financial incentives apparently makes it viable to shoot here. Add a bit of USian signage and other set dressing at the shoot and a […]

October reading or at least such as I remember it

Okay, so the thing is I know I read a whole bunch of short fiction in October, but the awesomeness of Canada has all but wiped the whole lot from my memory. Seriously, I can’t even remember the authors or titles let alone whether I liked them or not. Here’s what remains. The novel I […]

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 […]

Spark

I touched upon this a little in my Toronto post, but something that’s been running around my mind recently has been the value of inspiration. With the state of the book industry the way it is you might think writers would be tempted to play it safe and aim for writing the kinds of stories […]

Lighting the neon

It’s the last night of our stay in Toronto and we’ve elected to stay in the Gladstone Hotel, a former-flophouse, now-boutique hotel in the hipstery, artsy West Queen West district whose rooms are individually designed by artists. Ours is pink and baby blue. It has a pewter ceiling and a giant purple mirror, stencilled ferns […]