About ten years ago I had the task of following the royal family around Scotland. This sounds far more glamorous than it really was, since I wasn’t a royal correspondent in any real sense. I never saw the inside of a palace (not the hallowed areas marked off by red ropes, anyway) or got to … Continue reading What good are the royals?
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No time like the present (especially when it’s been and gone)
Now here's an update I ought to have got round to a long time ago. So I'll cut all the blurbery and just say that my story, The Storm-Flood, is available to read in Issue Five of The Right Eyed Deer, which you can download here. What is it? How about, 'a sweetly melancholic story … Continue reading No time like the present (especially when it’s been and gone)
The secret life of books
I’ve not been doing very much writing recently. The flotsam of ideas in my head have been stubbornly refusing to connect, like flecks of soured milk in a cup of tea or clumps of wet sugar. Then I saw this delightful little film and realised, not for the first time, that the best place to … Continue reading The secret life of books
Body Parts And Coal Dust
One of the stories I wrote for the 2010 Whittaker Prize has made it into the competition anthology. It’s slightly curious, because of all the eight pieces I'd written, The Long And The Short Of It was the one I’d written off as a bad job. A no-frills tale of middle managers in a sales … Continue reading Body Parts And Coal Dust
Doors closing, doors opening
Only two weeks into 2011 and already I've chalked up two rejection notices. The first came from esteemed sci-fi journal Asimov's and wasn't too big a shock. Sci-fi isn't my usual bag, but I'd written a story that had had a lot of positive feedback and figured it was worth the long shot. The other … Continue reading Doors closing, doors opening
The Pragmatics of Twitter
The other day when I logged into Twitter I noticed an odd thing. The number of people I follow had gone down by one. I'm used to my follower count bobbing up and down from day to day (at just over the 200 mark, since you ask), but someone disappearing out of my feed is … Continue reading The Pragmatics of Twitter
Risk taking
There’s a lot of terrible advice for writers out there at the moment. In fact, if I’d have to single out one thing as a deterrent to people thinking of starting to write, it’s have to be the mosaic of arcane and arbitrary rules scrawled on the Writers’ Club toilet walls. So it was refreshing … Continue reading Risk taking
Ten unmissable rules for writers
Latterly every writer who ever lifted a pen seems to have published their laundry list of do's and don'ts for fellow scribes. Even so, the list by Lance Boyle that I'm privileged to host on this website is quite unlike any other. Lance is a man who needs no introduction, so rather than bore you … Continue reading Ten unmissable rules for writers
Put the Gun Down, Martin
If you've yet to see the cinematic masterpiece that is Toy Story 3, I recommend you do two things. First, don't read beyond this paragraph, because I'm about to give away the ending. And second, dash down to your nearest cinema, if it's not too late, or put the DVD on pre-order, if it is, … Continue reading Put the Gun Down, Martin
Whitt and wisdom
I wasn’t sure at first whether to class the outcome of The Whittaker Prize 2010 as ‘success’ or ‘failure’. There’s a prevailing school of thought that urges people to adopt a ‘glass half-full’ mindset and ‘accentuate the positive’. But it’s always been one of my guiding principles to distrust a prevailing opinion, and besides I … Continue reading Whitt and wisdom