I think the big advantage of writing the way I do is that I’m freed from the tyranny of narrative utilitarianism. If I were writing about characters intended to be Good People, then every decision they made would be kind of a foregone conclusion: they’d have to do the Right… (keep reading)

I own a lot of DVDs and a growing number of Blu-rays. I’ve been collecting physical copies since I was a teenager; when everyone else started ditching their libraries in favor of Netflix, I steadfastly refused. Considering how little of what I want to watch is available to stream these… (keep reading)

Christ, you post 1400 words of your masc special forces protagonist taking the strap and suddenly everyone’s a fucking coward. Anyway, I’ve just finished the first draft of the next Casefile of Jay Moriarty story. It takes place in Herefordshire, and if you pay close attention to the Sherlock Holmes… (keep reading)

Over the weekend, itch.io (an indie games marketplace, and also one of the sites where I host my books) was taken offline by its domain registrar in response to a complaint by an automated piece of “brand protection software” deployed by toy company Funko. (I initially assumed this complaint was… (keep reading)

The UK government has decided to stop issuing physical residence permits to immigrants (like me) and start using “e-visas” instead. The practical upshot of this is that I need to register for my new e-visa using a phone app which, in the grand tradition of this country’s relationship with technology,… (keep reading)

One of the latest developments in the world of fanfiction is a debate over “archive-locking”: making one’s fanfics only visible to registered users of the archive on which they’re hosted (usually Archive Of Our Own). The argument in favour is that this prevents unintended use of the work (such as… (keep reading)

My RSS reader this week contains no less than three stories about how Bluesky is the rightful successor to Twitter and will, furthermore, save the internet. Despite this, I will not be signing up for Bluesky because I’ve determined the ideal number of Twitter-alikes in my life and it’s zero.… (keep reading)

A friend of mine sent me this screencap from a livestream of the Until Dawn remake: Until Dawn takes place in the Canadian Rockies, and Edmonton would be one of the nearest major cities to the fictional mountain where the game takes place. It also happens to be my hometown.… (keep reading)

A friend of mine is currently having his novel shopped around by an agent, and what he’s been hearing back is that the Big Five publishers almost exclusively want books with wordcounts of around 100 000 (to the point where authors with longer manuscripts, especially debut authors, are being told… (keep reading)

The thing about publishing as frequently as I do is that you eventually run out of ways to say “I’ve written a new thing, please check it out.” Anyway: I’ve written a new thing, please check it out. New Novelette: “Sebastian Moran Inflicts Six Traumatic Brain Injuries” When an art… (keep reading)