Shadows of the Apt

I regret to announce that I won’t be doing my annual readthrough of the Clarkes shortlist this year because of a thorny little conflict of interest. It appears that someone did, after all, think of the Children (of Time) and Portia and her little friends have scuttled their way onto the shortlist. Is this a good point to […]

Just a few of my #shapechallenge doodles from March. In other news; just about to start the third and last Tiger & Wolf book. Proper post soon, hopefully.

One of the recurrent topics at cons is whether e‑publishing will impact on the publication of shorter fiction. Thus far: not so much insofar as I've seen. Although it is now quite possible to, say, sell a single short story as an e‑book(let?) on Amazon, nobody seems to be saying this is a big thing and a way […]

Busybusy with secret projects, but here's a thing to be going on with.

Further to previous posts about wanting to get back into the drawing game, I discovered a rather neat little artist challenge on Twitter known as #ShapeChallenge. This is a diversion helmed by Studio TeaBreak (@virtualstudio) that I first found through Sarah McIntyre (who, with Phillip Reeve, creates such wonderful books as Cakes in Space and Pugs of the Frozen North) as @jabberworks. […]

So the tigers and the wolves have been let out of the cage and rushed off into the world. I don't know how this sort of thing affects most authors. For myself, I hit an absolute high buzz when I get to do something properly Authorial — a convention, say, or especially a launch, and then there's a crash twice as […]

In August, Tor.com will be publishing my novel Spiderlight, which will be my first US-side release for… a long time, actually. It will also be available in the UK, and possible elsewhere. Possibly I'll do a signing tour of Mirkwood. The cover for the book has just been revealed and I give you it here. This is not […]

Who's up for a bit of culture? Specifically Shakespeare! (waits) Anyone left? Or was everyone poisoned by tedious literature classes? My confession: I love Shakespeare. I used to act(1) in an amateur dramatics company back in Reading and we did a Shakespeare every year in the Abbey Ruins, which was a pretty good venue for it, and before that (and […]

The Tiger and the Wolf comes out in about three weeks, and I shall be part of an Authorial Omnithon at London's Forbidden Planet on the 12^th of February BUT THAT IS NOT ALL! As well as the chance to pick up a signed copy of the start of my new series, containing words nobody has ever seen before […]

So I feel I've been putting in the hours on my inhuman characters, what with the protagonists of Children of Time and this year's release of Spiderlight from Tor UK, as well as more human examples like the insect-kinden, or the shapeshifters of The Tiger and the Wolf. I first got into SF for the aliens. When I was a kid I would […]