I’m from Canada, where it’s a long-running joke that our celebrities have to wear name tags. It’s certainly true that being an artist in Canada is not a job that makes you rich unless your name is Margaret Atwood; as my dad likes to point out, even Pierre Berton —… (keep reading)

As previously mentioned in this newsletter, at some point within the past few years I completely lost track of the Hollywood hype machine. I have no idea which movies are being made, or when they’re supposed to come out, until I see whichever ads are on the side of a… (keep reading)

For reasons that may be obvious at this point, my mother is thoroughly sick of Facebook and wants to leave the site. Unfortunately Facebook is the thing keeping her in contact with friends and family she’d otherwise never see, so she needs a different way to keep in touch with… (keep reading)

Conventional publishing wisdom holds that it’s not a good idea to release a new book on the same day as a highly-anticipated title like Onyx Storm, but I’m pretty sure the overlap between my readership and Rebecca Yarros’ readership is, uh, nonexistent. New Release: “Jay Moriarty vs the Machine God”… (keep reading)

I have not yet figured out how one builds an effective book marketing strategy when one’s target demographic isn’t “queer romance readers” or “crime thriller fans” so much as “people who watched a lot of summer replacement shows that aired on TNT or USA Network in the late 2000s and… (keep reading)

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)