I went down to the old Bookbarn warehouse in Bristol this afternoon to scavenge some free books, following this report on the BBC website:

People in Bristol have been invited to help themselves to free books at a warehouse which were left behind when the owners left the site. Bookbarn’s lease on the premises in Arnos Vale recently expired and when the firm moved out it left behind thousands of books. Managers of the Paintworks site have invited people to help themselves.

Continue reading “Free Book Frenzy”

Since the publication of my first short story collection in August last year, I’ve written five full-length stories and a number of flash pieces, with a total word count of over 32,000 words.

One of these stories has already appeared in Interzone, and another has been sold to a forthcoming anthology. Updates on the rest will appear on the “stories” tab as they happen: Link to Stories.

The reason shows like Star Trek were so loved in their day is that when they first appeared, they were new and exciting and they epitomised the zeitgiest of their time. Where are the shows that do that for our time? Where are the films our kids will look back on with nostalgia? When my daughters go to the cinema, they’re going to want something more than tired retellings of shows that first aired before their father was born.

After all, what’s going to happen when they run out of old movies and shows to remake?

Maybe it’s time Hollywood stopped spending all its money on CGI and started investing in a few decent writers, and some new ideas?

You can now download my short story collection, The Last Reef, as an audio book. To find out more, click on the link or the picture:

http://tinyurl.com/cfm38w

“Powell and Elastic Press have managed to pull together one of the finest collections of SF short stories I have had the privilege of reading.” - Morpheus Tales

The following passage comes from the novel Consequences by Penelope Lively (Penguin 2008):

You do not need to do much hostess stuff, with poets. They are self-sufficient. They are mostly delighted to see one another (bar the odd feud that may surface), hive off into garrulous groups, and don’t need encouragement when it comes to the food and the drink. There are one or two people on whom an eye should be kept: Dawn Bracewell seems not to know many people, but one of the older women poets has taken her under her wing, and old Gareth Powell is famously taciturn and can spend an entire evening sitting alone, but even he seems to have melded with a group and is talking.

Studying literature teaches you how to write. If you want to know what to write, you have to study people.

This site has links to 100 blogs dealing with different aspects of creative writing, from checking your grammar to getting published.

Link:  top-100-creative-writing-blogs

This is an extract from a short story called “The Winding Curve” which I co-wrote with Robert Starr, author of Creek Water and The Apple Lady. The full story appears in Rob’s 2008 collection Sophistry By Degrees.

A year after his wife’s death, Mike finds himself on the old coast road south of town, with his daughter in the back seat. They’ve lingered too long at the cemetery, and now they’re driving around because he can’t face taking her home to an empty house.
Continue reading “Friday Fiction”

Are you on Twitter yet? If you are, check out Outshine, the Twitter-based magazine edited by Jetse de Vries. It currently features an untitled piece of fiction by yours truly – which at only 25 words is the shortest piece of fiction I’ve yet had published.

If you’re attending Eastercon in Bradford this year, you’ll be able to see me particpating on stage in the following programme items:

Continue reading “Eastercon LX 2009 Panels”