Most recent publications:
I Object (Interzone, June 2025)
Doctor Who: The Dead Star (audio novel, Big Finish, 2023)

( Published Books and Short Stories )

Draft Zero of 20,000-word SF novella "Weird Machine", ie, all the scenes are there, but some are still partly in outline form. I thought this was going to be a novel, but it sort of chose its own length.

Cory Doctorow: Rules for Writers (May 2020). On the Turkey City Lexicon and why those items are on that list.

Please Just Let Women Be Villains (Electric Lit, 2021). "From 'Wicked' to 'Cruella,' rehabilitated villainesses rely on outdated ideas of women's virtue."

Kill The Cat – The Awful Influence Of The World’s Worst Writing Guide (The Reprobate, 2021). The roller coaster analogy probably explains why I'm so bloody jaded.

Prayer Before Birth by Louis MacNeice. Found it!

Hurt Hawks by Robinson Jeffers

Finished off I Object (SF, 5000 words) and sent it to an anthology a couple of days ago. When it bounces back it's going into the drawer for six months. In the meantime I'm working on the outline for the robots novel (which keeps changing its name) and also playing with a possible SF story for a horror antho -- though it's based on a science fact I was sure I remembered but now can't find anywhere. Must take Hot Alphabet (SF, 6000 words) out of the drawer and get that into the Submissions Tracker. Edit: I took it out and it's absolute rubbish 😹

I don't blog the way I used to, but there is still a lot going on, in between bouts of illness.

It is ghastly revisiting a story you wrote two years ago, and the structure's OK, but rereading it line by line you can see how it garnered all those rejections. Things aren't explained properly (well, I knew what was happening!), etc, and also the curse of the nice, passive Orman protagonist. Fie and bollocks.

Orman's Law (which I shamelessly name after myself): how much a magazine pays per word is inversely proportional to the length of their description of what kind of fiction to send them.

Finally saw Un Chien de Andalou (1929). Who'd've thought that a movie which starts with that famous violent act against a woman would continue in much the same vein, if less spectacularly. (Why does every YT doco about Surrealism, however G-rated, have to include a clip of the notorious bit with the eye?)

I can't think straight -- the depression is crushing -- and yet I'm finding introductions to Dada and Surrealism nourishing, inspiring. I pondered how to do a Dadaist Doctor Who in response to the current show, but realised that the current show is already incoherent. Mind you, with tedious battles about continuity once more raging in fandom, a nonsensical, collage approach to the series is very tempting. But Surrealism, or something like it, seems to be where I started. Can I use it in the hard-ish SF I'm writing now?

3800 word SF story completed and submitted.

First Draft of End of the Line (SF short story, around 4000 words).

I'm going to try an experiment: set up a Patreon thing where readers get the first chapter of the story for free, then can sponsor the subsequent chapters. Many writers have successfully done this, so I thought I'd give it a go, in between working on the second novel and throwing stories into magazine slushpiles. :) Anyway, that first chapter is done. Now I have to see if I can figure out Patreon...