I think I may have developed consumption. All right, so it probably isn’t the real thing (and yes, technically my garret is a loft conversation), but I have still got a pretty impressive cough. In the absence of laudanum I’m drinking an awful lot of tea.

I’m somewhat ambivalent about Bonfire Night. Though there are a few people who I wouldn’t mind seeing burnt in effigy, Guy Fawkes isn’t one of them. At college, I had a poster on my wall saying’ Guy Fawkes: the only man to enter Parliament with honest intentions.’ Most modern northern European festivals hark back to […]

I’ve just found an exploded comet. Well, I didn’t find it as such, but I’ve managed to locate the romantically named Comet 17P/Holmes in the night sky. It’s not hard, as this thing is the size of Jupiter. It didn’t used to be, but it’s just exploded. This news will probably (hopefully) get picked up […]

For some reason most of the important things that have happened to me occur in the autumn (the book deal with Gollancz this May being a notable exception). This time two years ago I went off on the Big Trip (of which much more below, if you can be bothered to page down far enough). […]

Forgive me, but I’m going to rant. If you live in the U.K. and you read SF, you probably know what, or should I say who, has got me so worked up.  If not, then as I don’t  want to get in trouble, I’ll just refer to Ms X. Ms X is a ‘literary’ writer […]

Since returning from the Milford SF writer’s workshop last week (which was excellent, by the way), I’ve passed what I originally thought of as the half-way mark of the first draft of ‘Consorts of Heaven’.  I’m now getting to the part of the novel which many writers find a bit of a slog. I’m happy […]

My name is Jaine and I am a gamer. I should probably qualify that statement. Firstly, by ‘gamer’ I mean old fashioned table-top role-playing games, not these new-fangled computer adventures (fun though they can be). Secondly, I don’t game that much these days. It’s not something I feel the need to do any more, largely […]

This week, I have mainly been designing a theocracy. Actually that’s not entirely true, as I’ve now started to critique stories and novel excerpts for Milford, the annual British SF writers’ workshop week coming up soon. But I’ve also been world-building for ‘Consorts of Heaven’. My evil gaming past means I’ve done a fair bit […]

My story ‘The Path to the Sun’ is now available as a (free!) podcast from ‘The Great Beyond’. The link below should take you to it… thegreatbeyond.libsyn.com

We have friends from New Zealand staying. They’re originally from Round ‘ere but now live Over There. While I was working one of them went into the village. He came back and told me he’d just run into someone he knew. I asked if he meant from before he moved to NZ. No, he said, […]