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 […]
Art is made to disturb. Science reassures. There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain. – Georges Braque
Imagine if Dan Brown had the gumption to really whack us with a truly bizarre confection of a conspiracy about the Catholic Church, instead of that wimpy pile he served up. If you are going to show us an imaginary dark world hidden by a conspiracy of the ages, have a real red hot go […]
In her list of year’s best short fiction in her December Clavis Aurea column in Apex magazine, Charlotte Ashley gives an honourable mention to my story, ‘My Life as a Lizard‘. I am grateful to Ms Ashley for her kindness, and for her original review, and of course to the folk at Crossed Genres magazine who […]
It has been at least a year since I quoted this here, so time to do it again: Horace Tott spent an uneventful life in Cheshire always intending to write a large book on English magic, but never quite beginning. And so he died at seventy-four, still imagining he might begin next week, or perhaps […]
Have I mentioned that I cannot stand a cute rejection? It doesn’t make me feel better, and it makes me think I wasn’t taken seriously. I dislike them even more than normal rejection. At least I am used to normal rejection. Cute rejection is worse than chirpy morning people. I think I like rejections that aren’t […]
Far from home, I thought of a friend with whom I used to discuss books and religion, amongst other things. We are not in touch much, and it occurred to me I may only see him once or twice more in this life, if at all. I wrote to him about my family, and added: […]
Duncan Felton is going to run out of time. He has, with designer Finbah Neill, created/edited/assembled/published a calendar based anthology, The Grapple Annual from scratch, carving the parts, bolting them together, and all I can say is, hats off to him. Who does that? Each entry is related to a different day of the year. […]
Submissions require an author bio. I struggle with this. I look to others for inspiration. Some people include a half page of whimsy, at which I cringe, and have no publication credits, because they have not published anything. Others have a stream of credits, and of course, I can’t emulate that. Some list all the […]
My story ‘Good Boy’ has been published by Pseudopod. Here is a link, it is about 19 minutes in. I wrote many things over many years. I have boxes of notes and drafts. Occasionally I’d submit stories and collect rejection slips. Life, laziness, children, career, fear, all got in the way of taking things further. […]
