Samhain — or Halloween — is the best known of the ancient Irish fire festivals that mark the changes of the seasons. I delved into the origins of Samhain (pronounced “Sowen”) for a previous post on Halloween: the meme that reinfected Ireland. This year, I have no more noble goal than to share a picture […]
If you love authors, buy ebooks. Royalties from ebooks are — by a staggering amount — greater than paperback and hardcover books. Pounds against pennies, in some cases. So if you want your authors to have nice things, like enough money to keep writing, pay editors and commission cover artists…buy ebooks. I know, physical books […]
Blood River, my first Nightmare Vacations story, has a new cover to celebrate its second birthday and the imminent arrival of its sibling: Blood Point. With this new cover, Blood River is available in hardcover for the first time and includes a preview of my new story. Although Blood Point is not a sequel, both […]
August 1st marked the festival of Lughnasadh (loo-nasser if your mouth mangles those Irish phonemes). It’s the beginning of harvest season and a key date in Blood Point, my Irish Nightmare Vacations novel. Named after the pagan god Lugh, it’s another of those Irish festivals that sits between a solstice and an equinox. The big […]
Scrivener is my go-to writing tool for just about everything1 but it has a weakness: compiling Word documents with built-in headings that make them easy to navigate. Here’s how to solve that problem. I don’t often write about Scrivener because there’s a community of people who really know their way around it, not least the […]
June 23 marks Litha, the ancient midsummer’s eve celebration and the night when horror rises in my new novel, Blood Point. The quiet Irish village of Kinnity hides a dark history, from the brutal killing of a young woman in ancient Ireland to the mad 19th-century landlord building a pyramid tomb. When widower Josh and […]
If you want to publish or submit AI-generated writing, you need to know this: you don’t own that work. No one knows who owns that work. You had an idea and created the prompt that lead to the work, but in the world of intellectual property, ideas are worth nothing. Expression is everything. That’s why […]
If you’re going to use AI for writing or research, you need to know two things. The first is that AI doesn’t know anything. There are other important things to know about AI. It’s trained on content taken without permission of the creators. It contributes to rising greenhouse emissions and power consumption from technology companies. […]
Would you like to test drive the final drafts of Blood Point, my next Nightmare Vacations horror story? If so, register below to become a Beta Reader. Beta Readers are one of the last stops on the road from a story idea to a published novel. They’re a final chance to revise a book and […]
The weather might not agree yet*, but Lá Bealtaine is the beginning of summer in Ireland’s ancient Celtic calendar. It’s also the beginning of the countdown to launching a new horror story, Blood Point. Sign up to my newsletter for exclusive previews. Sandwiched between the spring equinox and summer solstice, Bealtaine, or “bright fire”, is […]