So there it is, the book, the cover, the full 400+ pages I’ve been working on for the last few years. More information about Emily Voss’ story is available on the dedicated page. If I’d known how much work there would be between writing “The End” and...
Hello from Belgium this time,There's a moment in the third chapter of Past Mistakes where Emily and Raymond find themselves in a room beneath a homeless shelter in the Bronx, standing in front of something that has no business being there.It's a smal...
Getting the visuals rightEmily Voss is thin, tough, wiry, with a couple of piercings, tattoos, pale skin and a tendency to dress in dark colors. That probably sounds detailed, but it isn't. It leaves a lot to the imagination. I only ever describe one...
The Scene Triggered A Rewrite I have a pathological fear of clichés. It's one of my defining weaknesses as a writer. I'm so afraid of writing something predictable or sentimental that I skip the emotional beats readers need to connect with...
Something Completely Different This week, no Emily Voss. No demons. No New York. Instead, you’re getting “Shadows,” a fantasy short story I wrote a few years ago. It’s different from Past Mistakes in tone, setting, and genre. It’s darker. M...
Urban Fantasy Isn’t A Guilty Pleasure There’s a negativity, not to say a snobbery, that works against certain genres. I write speculative fiction, including urban fantasy, and it’s subject to a degree of disdain from some types of readers (and m...
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...
