I’m doing NaNoWriMo this year. I have a Work In Progress and want the progress bit to happen faster. NaNo seems like a good focus for achieving that. My strategy this year is to throw myself body and soul in to the effort. To that end, I shall be at University of Leicester [...]
Yesterday I watched the great Bali Rai read a story aloud to twenty-thousand people at the Walker’s stadium at half-time of the Leice ster vs. Scunthorpe match. I’m not sure what the people of Scunthorpe made of it, but the football fans of Leicester loved it, and took away thousands of copies of the story [...]
Electric Velocipede have announced that issues 21 and 22 will be published together as a bumper double issue to be published in November. The TOC is below, and just happens to include My Love Sick Zombie Boy Band by (ahem) Damien G. Walter! MLSZBB was one of my Clarion submission stories, and benefited from detailed [...]
Well. This is my 500th blog post. HHUUUURRRRAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!! Coincidentally, it’s also effectively four years since I started blogging. I opened my blog in April 2006, but did not really start using it fully until August that year, when I moved from Blogger to WordPress. Looking back at my first post, it was quite clear I [...]
Whilst debating the possibilities of tomorrows SF magazines, I began idly wondering how big SF fandom really is. To give the question some parameters, SF fandom in this case means written speculative fiction, not mass media sci-fi. Once you add together all the cons, ‘zines, online and offline communities and all the other ways that [...]
During a conversation between The Speculators writing group recently, we came up with this idea. Genres are the fossils left by movements. To explain. Movements are conversations between writers, conducted through stories. During the period of movement, writers are talking to each other, exchanging ideas and generally discussing how to move the art of fiction [...]
There is an intelligent question at the heart of Ted Chiang’s new novella, The Lifecycle of Software Objects. The story is set in a near future, where online virtual worlds have grown to such levels of sophistication that they are able to support genetic programmes which can imitate the behaviour of life. Initially marketed as [...]
Jim Worrad is a member of of my writing group, The Speculators, and a fine writer of space opera styled science fiction. Jim and I were discussing the logistical problems of getting stories out to American magazines, and wonderful human being that he is, Jim agreed to pen a piece on the subject for this [...]
Er…so…I bought an iPad. I tried to resist, but Steve kept telling me that I wanted one, and in the end I just gave up and bought one. I’m still not entirely sure whether I really like the iPad, or whether Steve is telling me that I like the iPad. I feel like I might [...]
The Man Booker prize longlist was announced yesterday. It’s a subject I haven’t been shy coming forward about in the past, having previously stated my hatred for the prize and accusing it of ignorance and bigotry. And this years longlist does nothing to raise my opinion of the award. Narrow and elitist are about the [...]
