Way back in 2016 I wrote a short story, Man of War, for Manifold Press‘s Jane Austen inspired anthology A Certain Persuasion. When this anthology was launched at Queer Company 2, all contributing authors were invited to write a short article,…
Pretentiousness level: High
March 3, 2019
We did a ‘Story Cards’ creative writing exercise at Write Club last Thursday. This involves writing a short piece of fiction (or the start of a longer piece) inspired by an illustrated card drawn from a set (of about 40…
Gardening…
February 4, 2018
This is not the blog post I was going to write. I was going to write about how my outlook has changed over the past year – politics, changes in the genre I tend to hang round in, understanding more…
NaNoWriMo 2017
November 30, 2017
It’s November 30th, aka the day of reckoning in the world of NaNoWriMo. I’ve not “won”. I did write a total of just over 25k words, which was my minimum target, and I almost achieved my bigger target of writing…
Perspectives
November 12, 2017
Every so often when I’m writing I come across something which, when I look at it again, I realise “Oh! I wouldn’t have thought that a few years ago!” It’s not just age/maturity/extra life experience which causes these moments for…
Dangerous Books
August 1, 2017
There’s different types of dangerous books. We’ve all heard tales about books which are directly dangerous to your health: either the arcane knowledge they contain will drive you mad, cause you to become possessed, or some other terrible fate –…
Meeting the Sunderland
July 15, 2017
It’s nearly a year now since Under Leaden Skies was released. It seems both far longer and far shorter than that – I’ve certainly learned a lot in the last 12 months, and my writing has developed in ways I…
Gladstone’s Library – Food Thoughts
May 5, 2017
It’s taking me a while to work through all the words I wrote whilst at Gladstone’s Library a few weekends ago, but here’s another bit of my musings – I remembered I hadn’t yet posted it when I found myself…