In my last post, I shared a short story I was particularly happy with, called “Shadows.” I also explained in a previous post that this story had originally been very different. The first time I considered the concept of people losing their shadows, m...

I wrote Shadows over a year before I made it freely available. Much of that time was spent adjusting small details that no-one will ever notice. I liked this story very much, and I think that’s part of the reason why it was so hard to let go. The aud...

Sisyphus is a Korean science fiction drama exclusively available on Netflix. It follows a successful tech entrepreneur called Han Tae-Sul and Gang Seo-Hae, a woman who travels back from the future to save him from assassination, and by extension, sav...

I live in the UK, and as a resident of this Northern Isle, I have the stupendous privilege, for reasons that are a source of great international discontent, of having access to the Coronavirus vaccine now, rather than later. I took advantage of this...

Back at the beginning of lockdown – that’s over a year ago now – I went to the countryside for a few months with my family, accompanied by a writing prompt I’d come up with. This prompt had been kicking around in my head for a while now. I had an ide...

Netflix been a blessing during the pandemic. It’s brought us a huge variety of entertainment. When it ran out of Western shows to feed our ever-present need for distraction, there was an entire realm of foreign-language fiction to discover. Among the...

The Mask of Mirrors is a rich and thickly-embroidered story of intrigue, conspiracy and magic woven throughout a Venetian city where religion and magic are as much a part of the city as the cobblestones themselves. Into this society divided by class,...

Tricky, Tricky. There’s a lot to like about Shadow in the Cloud, including a great performance by Chloe Grace Moretz. There are also some ballsy special effects that took a historical war setting and injected some almost-Marvel-like magic, however un...

I’ve been writing short stories for a long time, and scratching out story ideas for even longer. Long before I started writing the things you’ve read. Given that experience, you might think that I knew a lot about writing. In some ways I did, but in...

To Sleep is a Sea of Stars is the science fiction debut of Christopher Paolini, formerly better known for his fantasy works, entitled “The Inheritance Cycle”: Eragon, Eldest, Brisingr and Inheritance. Paolini’s original four works were started when h...