Blood Point pre-orders are now open as the countdown begins to my second novel’s live date: Midsummer 2025. (FYI that’s June 23rd) Blood Point is a supernatural horror novel of Irish folklore, vengeful banshees, ancient curses and a father’s fight against a deadly legend. An Irish escape becomes a Midsummer Night’s terror in my second […]
Mars Needs Babies is my response to the challenge of writing a future shaped by Elon Musk. If you’d like a new piece of short fiction delivered to your email every month, please subscribe to my newsletter. Gwynne concentrates on breathing gently as she secures the suit seals. They’ve never been worn in and you can’t […]
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 […]
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 […]
What’s the biggest franchise and the biggest trope in SF? Star Wars. War is everywhere on Earth, so it makes sense that there will be war in space, off among the stars. Anywhere you you find life, there will be war. Right? Maybe. I started to think about this when I began writing a science […]
Most writers hate writing a synopsis, so it seems like the perfect challenge for an AI. What I discovered reveals a lot about the current state and limitations of generative AIs like ChatGPT and Google Gemini. The current wave of interest in AI is fascinating because it inspires so much hype on both sides. I […]
Among literature’s many grand claims is that great works embody universal truth about the human condition. It’s frequently used to emphasise the importance of literary fiction and establish the importance of canonical works and authors. The former canonical heretic and latter-day literary saint, James Joyce, himself declared Ulysses to be a novel of universal truth: […]
I write across two genres — science fiction and horror — and I harbour no ambitions towards literary fiction. Mainstream authors’ organisations are often focused on the literary and mundane genres, so I don’t feel entirely welcome. Fortunately there are SF and fantasy genre writers’ organisations where I’m an easier fit. Genre fiction writers’ organisations […]