It's been four years since my last email. If you've moved on, no hard feelings - unsubscribe link is below. Otherwise, I have good news:Past Mistakes, the first Emily Voss novel, is complete.I disappeared for four years. What happened? Life got in th...

Let me start with the good news.Past Mistakes, the first Emily Voss novel, is complete.I disappeared for four years. What happened? Life got in the way, in many different ways. Enough said.I frequently thought about returning to Emily Voss and her ba...

Today We are now in the long, slow, arduous stretch towards spring. Children chant songs about April and May, because that's when the flowers come back and we're reminded sunlight exists. Nobody sings about January and February, at least not in North...

Last week, where I live, absolutely perfect meterological conditions occurred.Perfectly awful that is.It was just warm enough for rain to fall in liquid form, but the ground was just cold enough to cause rain to freeze on contact. The entire city tur...

The weather's become much colder, with freezing temperatures as I walk my kids to school. On a sunny winter's day (which I'll admit is rare where I live), the view of daybreak peircing the mist that rises from the fields near my home, as we walk, is...

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...