Worldcon schedule

Flying out on Tuesday morning to the wonderful city of Helsinki, this years host of Worldcon, the world science fiction convention. I really couldn’t be more excited. Finland a country about which I’ve harboured a serious curiosity for years now and I can’t wait to finally get over there and spend some time enjoying their […]

BFS award nomination

Really pleased to discover that my short story collection, Secret Language, has been shortlisted for this year’s British Fantasy Award. It has some truly excellent company and whoever wins come the end of September will be a worth winner, I reckon. On the subject of the BFS awards, I’ve been asked to judge the Magazine/Periodical […]

Elasticity: the Best of Elastic Press

Really excited about the imminent release of Elasticity: The Best Of Elastic Press, edited by Andrew Hook. For the uninitiated, between 2002 and 2008 Elastic Press kick-started the careers of dozens of indie, genre and slipstream writers by giving them a platform to showcase their short fiction. I still treasure volumes by the likes of […]

No more heroes

So, I finished a book today. It’s called Queen of Clouds*. Those of you who’ve been paying attention will be all like: Oh, good job, son, well done, but didn’t you just have a book out? In addition to the one that came out this time last year? And don’t forget that anthology last autumn […]

Memoirist launch

The official release date for The Memoirist is this coming Monday, March 20th. You’ll be order it online and from your local bookshop from then. But if you live in the Glasgow area, why not consider coming to our wee, toaty launch event. It’s on Monday, April 3rd, at the Saramago bar in the CCA […]

Introducing…The Memoirist

What’s a “memoirist”, I hear you cry? Well, in my new book, it’s a woman called Fizz who assembles memoirs out of online data. It’s set in our near future, when a combination of surveillance culture, the degradation of privacy laws and social media ubiquity have made people obsessed with the face they present to […]

2016 Roundup

So, it’s December again. A time when people traditionally look back on the year, but considering what 2016 has dealt us…in general terms at least, let’s not. More specifically, December is the time when many authors look back on their year’s output, and actually, by any standards, mine has been pretty successful. June saw the […]

Archaeology

A few months ago, during an attempt to tame the depths of the Big Cupboard In The Hall, I unearthed a box of last century media – floppies, minidisks, zip drives. And on one of the zip drives I was chuffed as ninepence to find a dump of files from one of my old PCs, […]

Thirty Years of Rain

Last night I sat for a couple of hours in a small room with 17 other people taking turns critiquing a piece fiction. The chat was good, the vibe lighthearted, the critique uniformly honest and forensically accurate and the author stoic. And then we went to the pub.A regular night at the Glasgow SF Writers’ […]

Myriad Lands

Just received contributor copies of a wonderful new two-volume anthology from Guardbridge Books. Myriad Lands‘ remit was to collect stories set in non-traditional settings, and Volume 2 features a story set in the world of The Moon King. It’s based around a deleted scene from the book which features a cabaret club that happens somewhere […]