#30

So there is no real metric other than enjoying what I do. A writer is someone who writes, I spose. But when are you really a writer? When someone publishes your story? When someone pays you for a story? When someone pays you SFWA approved professional rates for a story? That happened once, early on. […]

I let Donna Tartt down …

Hello  Mr. Stevens, If only I had written a book regarding which Ms Tartt could be addressing me. If only the first in this series of emails had not arrived the day after someone(s) in Nigeria had been looking at my blog. If only my name was not in different font to the rest of the […]

Sisyphus, bound

I am very grateful to Sam Moss for publishing my short piece, “Sisyphus, bound” in ergot magazine. The boulder is stuck fast. It ain’t going anywhere. Sisyphus is very UNhappy. Click on the title above to read it for free. See my other stories here. Now, that’s a rock

Not a Speck of Light

I first came across Laird Barron a dozen or so years ago when I was working my way through Ellen Datlow’s yearly horror collections. Since then he has become one of “my” authors, those whose next book I eagerly await. One of the best things that I ever read on Twitter was what I think […]

Grooming my Grandfather

This story of mine was based on many years of a very similar dream. I would visit my mother’s father as he sat on a chair on a concrete slab in the backyard of his home. It was a yard I knew well from my childhood. Though he was dead and would not speak, he […]

Blur

My story Blur falls into the category of “I really like this story that I wrote”*. Perhaps you might like it as well. It has moths, corporate nastiness, self-help, redemption, recovery, a lot of weirdness, bowel motions, and more moths. If you did not read it in the cooly-named anthology ProleSCARYet, perhaps you would like […]

Lawrence of Arabia

On this day in 1935, Lawrence of Arabia died in a motorcycle accident. Was it as straightforward as that? Read the secret history of his life and death, and of the dark forces with which he contended, in my story, Some Corner of a Dorset Field that is Forever Arabia, published in Three-lobed Burning Eye, […]