Years ago I was helping a junior staff member who was having some difficulties. Ours can be an arduous profession, with long hours, lots of conflict, and difficult policy decisions which have to be defended. She was talking about some of the difficulties she was facing, particularly as a woman of a different background in […]
I remember the moon landing. I kept asking my mother when they were going to put my cartoons on, instead of all this low quality space stuff. At about 3pm, I realised I would not be seeing my morning cartoons. It was just wrong. I think my basic sense of injustice springs from that event. […]
Sergeant Burns’ penultimate report (yes, there is a link there) ended up in last year’s Grapple Annual. I’m hoping he has a few more adventures left in him.
All writing is genre writing, literary fiction is just another genre. And genre is just a way of working out where to put the damn thing on the right shelf in the book store. One day, I keep promising myself, I’ll write a series of posts on comfort food, the books I have come back […]
A little shout out for the NSW Writers’ Centre’s Speculative Fiction Festival (click on the highlighted text to be taken straight to their webpage), being held a the centre in the beautiful grounds of the former mental asylum at Callan Park. I have previously enjoyed many speakers and panels at the Speculative Fiction Festival and […]
And of course I’d lie to myself, telling myself there was still time, there were novelists who didn’t get started until they were fifty, hell, even sixty. Probably plenty of them. – Stephen King Or in the words of my dear friend Brett, ‘get a fucking move on’. Mate, the finger is officially out.
“I’m looking for the dope with the microscope” – Iggy Pop One of my favourite lines, from the theme song from one of my favourite films, Repo Man, I was horrified to read yesterday that the quote is actually “looking for the joke with a microscope”. Several googles later, I was reassured by other sites […]
Christopher Lee is dead, and no one is going to bring him back by dripping the blood of a virgin on his ashes in a deconsecrated London church (I walked past many such buildings last Christmas, I didn’t notice any jaded covenists hanging around waiting for dark, they all seemed to have been converted to […]
Gentle reader, after something of a drought, I am very pleased that a story of mine, ‘This Neil Armstrong is not dead’, has just been published in the latest edition of Cafe Irreal, and I am very grateful. I am particularly pleased that story has found a home. Click on the story title above and […]
Art is made to disturb. Science reassures. There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain. – Georges Braque
Nobody is looking 