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, […]

Worldcon 2024

The World Science Fiction Convention is back in Glasgow from Aug 8th to 12th. Almost 20 years after the last one and years in the planning by a horde of supremely wonderful volunteers, this event is shaping up to be an AWESOME festival of science fiction, fantasy, and everything in between. During the five days […]

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 […]

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 […]

2021 Roundup

Another barmy year, eh? A year of obsessively watching trends and numbers and graphs, of living carefully and hopefully. A year of feeling that life was getting back to normal, until it wasn’t. Another year of losing friends. And of doing the only thing a creative person can do, get the head down and continue […]

Resolution, it’s a mug’s game

At the beginning of the last couple of years I’ve done a sort of “creative goals” post, and the one thing I’ve learned from the exercise is that, for the self-propelled creative type at least, planning is largely futile. Too often opportunities come your way that you couldn’t have foreseen and, if you have neither […]

Read like a reader

I’ve been thinking for quite a while now about the difference in reading experience between readers and writers. To my mind, readers engage with a story in a pure way that eschews awareness of the mechanisms by which it is told and enables the imagination to properly bring the characters to life, to ride-shotgun on their […]

Balance

Friday, 6pm, Munros on Great Western Road. Trying to balance the fizzing fatigue of stopping after a long period of intense work with sunshine and cold, sour half of Redwillow’s Wreckless pale ale. And, at the same time, straining at the leash. Most writers are not full time writers. We work to live and we scribble […]

Moving on…

So yesterday was a good day. That’s an understatement. Days like that are the rewards for working hard, and reworking harder, and then doing it again. And again. And, as soon as the moment has passed, it’s time to get on with the work again. But before I get down to it my Saturday morning session […]