The Real Cost of Magic In most urban fantasy, magic is just another resource. You have a mana pool, a power meter, an energy reserve. Cast a spell, it drains a bit. Rest up, it refills. It’s video game logic applied to narrative: magic as f...
I don’t like destiny as an inciting incident. It's Ok in real life - destiny is fine when it’s just a vague concept that makes people feel better about the universe. But in fiction? In urban fantasy specifically? I’m exhausted by the tropes...
Who is Emily Voss? Emily’s deeply, deeply flawed. Everything she is, everything she knows, and all of her reactions are the product of the mistakes she’s made in the past, and she’s constantly trying to move forward, despite a heavy burden of re...
What Demons Want A lot of urban fantasy treats demons like vending machines. Summon one, make a deal, sign a contract. The mortal is gets outsmarted because demons are clever and contracts have loopholes. It’s a good narrative structu...
What I’m Working On… I told you in my last email that Past Mistakes was complete and I’m launching in the first half of 2026. Now we're in 2026. Here’s a tentative schedule and how that breaks down: December-January: Beta Readers I've...
I went about writing Past Mistakes entirely the wrong way. That’s not a great way to start a post, but the mistakes go back years and have since been corrected. I can be honest about them now. As with most of my stories, it started with a premise. Th...
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...
