Damien G. Walter

So a captain is married to her ship, and a novelist is married to her readers. Earlier this week I wrote about the social artist in my column for The Guardian, and collected some irate responses in return. What about the loner artist? What about us guys and gals who want to sit alone in [...]

Over on Twitter and Facebook I asked folk to tell me which SF author they would turn to for life advice, for words of wisdom and guidance through the labyrinth of life. And I got quite a response! [View the story "Wisest of the wise in SF & Fantasy" on Storify] Popular choices include Neil [...]

Last year I wrote a short story called A Vast Bit of Hod, which I published to my blog here. As I mentioned at the time, the story is also a riddle. I have congratulated half a dozen people who emailed me the answer. This evening James Everington tweeted me to ask: btw, when are you [...]

You know, those things which are only an issue if you happen to be the denizen of a world created in the imagination of a jobbing fantasy author. Or an ageing English academic. Or a frustrated fan trying to turn pro author. A secondary world always tells you more about the inside of the authors [...]

Writing can be a cruel game. Not least for those who, to innocent bystanders, might seem like winners in the game of literary life. Take Christopher Priest for instance. With a long and esteemed career in writing, numerous accolades under his belt and a Hollywood adaptation of his novel The Prestige still within living memory, [...]

I’m quite chuffed to say that my story Star has been accepted by new UK based Universe magazine and will appear in their first ‘Albion’ themed issue in May 2012. Star was written in the 5th week of my time at the Clarion writer’s workshop in 2008. I went to Clarion with the mission of breaking [...]

UPDATE: A new translation sent to me by Richard Gardner UPDATE: A contemporary re-imagining of Im Abendrot by Neil Fulwood UPDATE: I have added a new translation contributed by Robin Wallace, and the amazing performance by Jessye Norman of Richard Strauss ‘Im Abendrot’. I’m collecting translations of the poem ‘Im Abendrot’ by Joseph von Eichendorff, [...]

As my winter hibernation comes to end I’m stumbling like an angry bear from my cave for a few events over the next few weeks. (Actually I’m quite a chirpy bear currently, so no fear for any of the events organisers involved!) Saturday 10th March : I am the Science Fiction Book Doctor at Derby [...]

My friend Amy Sundberg talks about the Writing Mind, in response to Jeff VanderMeer’s missive that forcing your concentration to meet a fixed daily word count isn’t a universally good idea. Even when you aren’t writing, you can still be writing. The imagination is always busy, and sometimes it does its best work when we [...]

People used to accuse artists who took the corporate dollar of ‘selling out’. It’s a phrase that seems to have fallen from fashion, perhaps because art has become so aligned with entertainment in the popular imagination that it’s hard for people to see what  ’selling out’ out even means any more. Why would you criticise [...]

At any given moment on the inter-webs there are probably dozens of irate Sci-Fi / Fantasy fans getting agitated about those damn literary authors coming and writing genre, while genre writers themselves miss out on the credit they deserve. Which is about as silly as shouting at someone for stealing your flowers when they have [...]

  Paulo Coelho, in amongst his thoughts on the insanity of SOPA, shares the idea that all writers are only recycling four stories. First, because all anyone ever does is recycle the same four themes: a love story between two people, a love triangle, the struggle for power, and the story of a journey. I [...]