I’m wondering whether it’s unprofessional to name a starship after a song, if that happens to be the song the music-tech is playing to you at the exact moment you need to come up with a name for a starship. Nah, it’s not unprofessional. It’s synchronicity.

So, I’m back from the annual autumn week in a holiday cottage in the wilds of Britain. Cornwall this year, staying in an old watch house in Gorran Haven, which is almost as a quaint as Mousehole, but without the crowds and with a lovely beach. The cottage, recommended by a friend, was unlike anywhere […]

Tomorrow I’m off to Cornwall for a week of cream teas, cliff-top walks, and novel revision. I’d hoped to finish my first pass at the requested changes for Consorts of Heaven before I left, but they’re knottier than I first thought. I’ve ended up re-working much of the middle section, and I need to keep […]

For them as is interested, I’ve recently participated in an online panel for Bookgeeks.co.uk, discussing how authors feel about maps and illustrations. The results can be found here until this Thursday, after which you can access it by going to the Bookgeeks home page and looking up ‘Author panels’, of which there is currently just […]

Actually just the one editor, but it was still pretty intense. Consorts of Heaven is the first novel I’ve had seriously, professionally edited, as Principles only needed line-edits. The experience of discussing exactly what needed to be cut/altered/added with someone who has strong views and many years experience was certainly interesting. Doing it in a […]

I’ve been sent another positive review for Principles of Angels, this one from the Fantasy Book Critic website. I should probably go surf for some less complimentary reviews to stop me getting ideas above my station, but I’m too busy, what with preparation for the Milford SF workshop week, making headway on the first draft […]

Making the journey from hobby writer to pro involves learning new lessons, and making various choices. Some choices, such as choosing to sacrifice large swathes of my social life for my nascent writing career, are major. Others, such as how to refer to my books in print, aren’t. However, this is still a choice I […]

Recently the real world has been intruding into my writing life. I’ve had to do extra hours at the day-job, and weekends have been – pleasantly – filled with festivals. Much of the time I have spent in t’garret hasn’t been on actual wordsmithing. With the detailed comments on CONSORTS back from my editor, I’ve […]

This week, I have mainly been plotting. I find dancing a surprisingly good way of working on gnarly plot points, and with festivals the last two weekends and another this weekend, there’s a lot of that going on at the moment. My friends are very understanding of my tendency to suddenly exit the Mosh/Morris pit […]

I’ve just heard that my short story ‘Twilight at the Change House’ will be published in next month’s issue of Aeon magazine. The story isn’t set in the ‘Hidden Empire’  universe, but does feature a smattering of my usual obsessions: the true nature of reality, paying the price and stories that eat their own tails. […]