Show of hands: Eastercon

All this genre chat reminds me that the annual SF get-together known as Eastercon is almost upon us. I say this every year, but I adore Eastercon. Four days in a hotel with good friends talking about all the things we love. How could I not? This year’s event, being at Heathrow, has already sold […]

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 […]

Eastercon selling out!

By which I mean not that the venerable UK SF convention is going down the movie and TV stars route, but that with a week and a half still to go before the event there are almost no tickets left. I’ve been going to Eastercon for a long time now–I skipped the Heathrow one in […]

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 […]

John Klima

Little bit of pimpage for editor friend, John Klima. For those of you who don’t know him, John’s the editor of Hugo-winning short fiction zine, Electric Velocipede. Specifically, he’s the genius who asked writers to create stories around the championship-deciding words of the Scripps spelling competition, and collected the ones he liked best into Logorrhea: Good […]

Clarke award shortlist

So, the 2012 Clarke award shortlist was announced this morning and, as has become the custom, the genre corner of Twitter has lit up like a Christmas tree as commentators register their surprise. That’s one of the things I love about the Clarke’s – the shortlist is never predictable. In fact there is now an […]

Smiles and Sunday Mouths

I’m wrote this, appropriately enough, on a Sunday morning in March. A stunning day and, once I was done, I went out for leisurely donner down Great Western Road. Which is exactly what Sundays are for. The reason for the post is to properly announce and celebrate the newest Murnie release: the sundaymouth ep. As we did […]

It’s Friday, so it must be…

Today seems to be a day to be talking about music, and that got me thinking about the fact I’ve not done a NAF entry for ages. It’s not that I’ve not been buying new music (on Fridays or any other days), just that I’ve had very time for those kinds of posts. Hopefully I’ll […]

Open mouth, prepare to speak

Really pleased to say that the new murnie ep is now available for pre-order over on Bandcamp. This one is called sundaymouth, it has four tracks and I’ll be posting in more detail about it over the weekend, but for now you can hop on over there if you like and pre-order the album by pledging anything […]