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As Phoenix Sullivan suggested that I republish my story from the Extinct anthology, I have gone ahead and used Amazon's dtp site to make The Restoration Man available for the Kindle (if you're in the UK you can buy it here, if you're in the US you can buy it here). I was quite pleased… Continue reading Swallowing Amazon

We like an ending, don't we? We all love our stories to end with a classic hero-kills-villain or a girl-gets-boy or a mutant-horse-overthrows-government ending. It's human nature. Even though the lives of the fictional characters don't necessarily end when a book finishes, the implication is that their struggles do. Happily ever after. Life isn't like… Continue reading An end to a means

I have a tendency to overwrite. I know this. My natural tendency has always been to lose myself in the detail and tumble along in a torrent of adverbs, surfacing only at the end of a paragraph to blink, gulp in some air and then dive straight back in. Like I said, I know this.… Continue reading The colour purple

So, I finished the zombie short story that I wrote about recently. It's called Z, and I've taken Phoenix's advice and submitted it to Pill Hill Press, who are currently open for submissions for an anthology called The Big Book Of New Short Horror, a title that sounds a little like something out of Sesame… Continue reading Z

I just finished reading The Grass Is Singing, Doris Lessing's excoriating novel of 1940s Rhodesia.Yes, I know it was published in 1950. Look, I've been busy.Whilst I was disappointed with the ending - I didn't think that Moses' motive in killing Mary Turner was examined in nearly enough depth, and as such the murder came… Continue reading Tell me about Doris Lessing

A great post by C. J. Hall about Readers Block, which he describes as an overwhelming lack of desire to read any fiction.I can't say I've ever experienced it.

I've just found out that two blogs have written about the Extinct anthology, which of course contains my short story The Restoration Man: Responsible Reading from the Not Extinct Yet blogHelp the Tasmanian Devils! from the Teaching Biology blog There's also a cool campaign image:So this is another reminder that if you want to help… Continue reading Extinct – two blogs

I'm running the Action Against Hunger 10K in Regents Park this September, so if you want to sponsor me for this worthy cause you can do so on my JustGiving page. Thanks!

Bub, from Day Of The DeadI heard a programme on Radio 4 the other day called Vampires vs Zombies. Colon-stompingly awesome, you might think...but bear in mind that this was Radio 4, so there was less of the relentless visceral blood-spattered cerebellum chewing and more of the psychological investigation of the relative sociocultural evolutions of… Continue reading Vampires vs Zombies

A recent post by C. J. Hall (well, relatively recent) is about how independent high-street bookshops are dwindling away and dying, leaving only the homogenised W.H. Borderstones Etc or the write-by-numbers horrors of the supermarket aisle as the last repository of actual physical books that we can leaf through and sniff and rub against ourselves… Continue reading Obscure books