2025 ROUNDUP

It’s that time again: December with a vengeance, and time to take stock my creative year. On the surface it feels like it was a quieter year compared to 2024, but that’s no bad thing. Fiction-wise, in 2025 I published three new short stories. At the start of the year, Her Little Ray Of Sunshine […]

World Fantasy Convention 2025

World Fantasy 2025 is coming. If you’re looking for me, this is where I’ll be…

Blood In The Bricks

A little over a year ago I approached Ian Whates of NewCon Press about an idea I had for an anthology. Like many horror readers I’d been wholeheartedly enjoying the folk horror boom, but I’d started to notice diminishing returns in terms of the originality in the stories I was reading. At the same time, […]

Remains

If you’ve visited this blog before, you might remember that I’ve been writing a bunch of weird short stories on the theme of bequests and inheritances. I wrote about it back in 2023 while the idea was still coalescing and since then it’s turned into a pretty fertile source of inspiration. The stories have done […]

Coming soon…

2024 has been a pretty good year for publishing short fiction, and keeping the momentum going, I’ve a few more lined up for 2025 already. Boreal, an anthology of taiga/forest-focused horror stories is due out from Strange Wilds Press in February. My contribution, a gentle folk horror piece set in the ancient Caledonian Forest in […]

Gallus

The Glasgow SF Writers’ Circle has a new book out. GALLUS is a celebration of Glaswegian writing published to coincide with the World Science Fiction Convention which begins here in Glasgow this week. I’ve been a member of GSFWC since I started writing way back in the 1990s. It’s an amazing, supportive community, and an […]

BSFA award 2024 shortlist

You don’t get many days like last Thursday. I mean, it was February 29th, so obviously… but, aside from that, it was the official release day for Charlie Says. And it was the day that Andrew Wilson and I finalised the Table of Contents for our Nova Scotia 2 anthology, which we are very excited […]

Kind Words

As a writer, any time someone says something nice about your work, you get a little glow. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been in the game, there are always inner insecurities and a little bit of external validation adds a welcome handful of kindling to the campfire of self belief and pushes the darkness […]

2023 ROUNDUP

This year ended up being a productive one, all things considered. I definitely feel like I’ve rediscovered the ability to get into a regular creative routine again. Partly that’s due to returning to working in the office two days a week, reclaiming the potential for cafe writing that’s lost when I work from home. It […]

Keepsakes and Hand-me-downs

Over the last few months I’ve been writing a bunch of new short stories. All are loosely in the horror or weird fiction genres, but that’s not the only link between them. Each tale also includes a bequest or inheritance. I’ve been thinking a lot about the things that are passed down through the generations. […]