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.
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 […]
(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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Souls just out of their graves having to answer for lives most of them never understood in the first place. Such hard lives. Lila, by Marilynne Robinson
Graham Joyce is one of my writers. Like you, I have a bunch of them. I come across them somehow, often at a book sale, buy something cheap, then after enjoying it, work my way through their back catalogue, and still enjoying them, buy each new book as it comes out. Too rarely I reflect […]
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 […]
Nobody is looking 