Hello from Belgium this time,There's a moment in the third chapter of Past Mistakes where Emily and Raymond find themselves in a room beneath a homeless shelter in the Bronx, standing in front of something that has no business being there.It's a smal...

Getting the visuals rightEmily Voss is thin, tough, wiry, with a couple of piercings, tattoos, pale skin and a tendency to dress in dark colors. That probably sounds detailed, but it isn't. It leaves a lot to the imagination. I only ever describe one...

The Scene Triggered A Rewrite I have a pathological fear of clichés. It's one of my defining weaknesses as a writer. I'm so afraid of writing something predictable or sentimental that I skip the emotional beats readers need to connect with...

Something Completely Different This week, no Emily Voss. No demons. No New York. Instead, you’re getting “Shadows,” a fantasy short story I wrote a few years ago. It’s different from Past Mistakes in tone, setting, and genre. It’s darker. M...

Urban Fantasy Isn’t A Guilty Pleasure There’s a negativity, not to say a snobbery, that works against certain genres. I write speculative fiction, including urban fantasy, and it’s subject to a degree of disdain from some types of readers (and m...

I went about writing Past Mistakes entirely the wrong way. That’s not a great way to start a post, but the mistakes go back years and have since been corrected. I can be honest about them now. As with most of my stories, it started with a premise. Th...

In my last post, I shared a short story I was particularly happy with, called “Shadows.” I also explained in a previous post that this story had originally been very different. The first time I considered the concept of people losing their shadows, m...

I wrote Shadows over a year before I made it freely available. Much of that time was spent adjusting small details that no-one will ever notice. I liked this story very much, and I think that’s part of the reason why it was so hard to let go. The aud...

Sisyphus is a Korean science fiction drama exclusively available on Netflix. It follows a successful tech entrepreneur called Han Tae-Sul and Gang Seo-Hae, a woman who travels back from the future to save him from assassination, and by extension, sav...

I live in the UK, and as a resident of this Northern Isle, I have the stupendous privilege, for reasons that are a source of great international discontent, of having access to the Coronavirus vaccine now, rather than later. I took advantage of this...

Back at the beginning of lockdown – that’s over a year ago now – I went to the countryside for a few months with my family, accompanied by a writing prompt I’d come up with. This prompt had been kicking around in my head for a while now. I had an ide...

Netflix been a blessing during the pandemic. It’s brought us a huge variety of entertainment. When it ran out of Western shows to feed our ever-present need for distraction, there was an entire realm of foreign-language fiction to discover. Among the...

The Mask of Mirrors is a rich and thickly-embroidered story of intrigue, conspiracy and magic woven throughout a Venetian city where religion and magic are as much a part of the city as the cobblestones themselves. Into this society divided by class,...

Tricky, Tricky. There’s a lot to like about Shadow in the Cloud, including a great performance by Chloe Grace Moretz. There are also some ballsy special effects that took a historical war setting and injected some almost-Marvel-like magic, however un...

I’ve been writing short stories for a long time, and scratching out story ideas for even longer. Long before I started writing the things you’ve read. Given that experience, you might think that I knew a lot about writing. In some ways I did, but in...