Best Horror of the Year

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 […]

APOLLO

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

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.

Love Hurts

Love Hurts. Indeed it does, and thank goodness for that, as it has led to the speculative fiction anthology, Love Hurts from Meerkat Press, and I am very happy that one of my stories will be appearing in the collection. More later, but left click here to check out the latest news.

In praise of the idiosyncratic …

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 […]

Speculative Fiction Festival

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 […]

Get a move on …

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.

This Neil Armstrong is not dead

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 […]

Who do you think you are, George Orwell?

(Having published five short stories (one of them twice!) its fairly important that I make an arse of myself by drawing a comparison between George Orwell and, well, moi.) I purchased a copy of a slim George Orwell volume, ‘Why I write’, part of the Penguin Great Ideas series, last (European) summer when I was in […]

Little Wilson

Anthony Burgess, book reviewer extraordinaire, amongst many other things, dared to opine that book reviews have no effect. That cannot be true, for when I saw the (very favourable) review of the first volume of his confessions, Little Wilson and Big God in the Sydney Morning Herald, I took my brand new Commonwealth Bank key […]