Thoughts

(Gold model of a chariot, 500-330BC) In the book I’m writing at the moment, the main character finds themselves torn from their ordinary life in my hometown of Barry. I wanted them to find an ally and mentor to help them navigate their conflict and keep them alive.I wanted this character, who I ended up…

I’d not long started my career in videogames when a game designer told me that good game design is giving people what they want, but also giving people something they didn’t realise they wanted, but now they’ve got it, they’re delighted. Similarly, if you cannot offer something new and compelling as an opposition party in…

“Maybe you don’t want to ask a question. Maybe you just want to have it answered for you before you ask it. That would be better.” Larry Page, 2014 “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers…we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is…

I’m left-wing. I think I know what that means, but I’m never sure. I come from a family who have always been left-wing. Their arguments and their actions were hugely influential on my politics. I did once think that it was entirely because of that upbringing that I became left-wing; Labour to be precise, despite…

In the last episode… I had just seen my book for the first time in a bookshop. March 2016. Over two and a half years on a hell of a lot has changed in my life, good and bad. Now it’s Saturday morning, two days after the above picture was taken. There’s a lot more…

“Everything we love is about to die, and that is why everything we love must be summed up, with all the high emotion of farewell, in something so beautiful we shall never forget it.” In their own utterly distinct ways, Picasso and Tolkien were creative contemporaries.  They shared nothing, perhaps, beyond their being obsessed with…

This is a big chunk of my latest newsletter. I’ll drop them in here from time to time so you can see the kind of things that my subscribers have agreed to be sent to their inbox, those lucky/weird people (delete as appropriate)… Mind-blowing. That’s my considered opinion of the two major exhibitions you can…

Here’s the contents of the first newsletter I sent out to my first couple of subscribers :) If you’d like some of this in your inbox occasionally, you can sign up via the link above! The future is quieter. I’ve set up this newsletter primarily so that I can keep in touch with anyone who…

…aka ‘Why I’ve decided to boycott Facebook and Google.’ It began innocently enough. I fancied popping along to Bristolcon for the first time and I was invited to do a panel called ‘You are the product’. I’d put it down as an option (the organisers offer a range of panel ideas and pick those options…

They’ve always seemed easy to parody, the Abstract Expressionists. ‘They just flicked paint about’, ‘can’t they draw?’ etc. So I was as surprised as anyone to fall in love at the RA exhibition last weekend. The galleries were crammed with works, to the displeasure of some critics, but it gave me an opportunity to see…

All my life, on a clear night, I look up. The vast, hypnotising beauty of eternity surrounds us; unmediated, glorious, silent. A tilt of my head pinions me helplessly on the spear of my curiosity, my meaning. I want to explore.

Amy Winehouse had voice to burn, a sound burnished by a drunk god showing off, like He took a bet to make another Billie Holiday and won the bet with a sad contempt.

David Simon’s The Wire is high on all lists of unmissable television.  I’ve heard many people describe season 2 as the weakest season. I completed it over the weekend and hope this is true, if only because it was riveting.

“My name’s Gant and I’m sorry for my poor writing.” So begins chapter one of Snakewood. As I planned out the book I fretted a great deal over how to immerse readers in the lands, cities and lives of the world of Sarun, in which the story is set. I recalled how vividly I daydreamed…

I was gearing up for March 17th, when I’d finally see my book sit quietly on a shelf alongside hundreds of others, as though it was the most ordinary thing; just a book, on a shelf. I was preparing myself to be, well, a bit underwhelmed? The anticipation couldn’t possibly deliver a satisfying payoff, so…

The poem ‘Epitaph On An Army Of Mercenaries’ by AE Housman** is one of my favourites, and graces Snakewood as its foreword. It was an influence on the novel not so much because it happened to be about mercenaries, but because I had challenged myself to tell a story about them such that a reader…

…as a teenager, then a man in my twenties and thirties and I used to look at the science fiction and fantasy novels and believe I, also, was a writer, when I wasn’t.

This post contains Game of Thrones spoilers, for, well, almost all of it, along with the movie adaptation of The Mist and the opening of the Mayor of Casterbridge, oh and possibly King Lear.  Yep, I think that’s it.

I was captivated by the gorgeous artwork when it first popped up in my Steam shop window.  A quick scan of some reviews was enough for me to buy it.  Then, as I’ve been rather busy, I shelved it until now. After ten minutes I was utterly immersed.  The Banner Saga, by the Texas based…

It had been a long time since I listened to The KLF’s ‘Chill Out’ album.  I was trying to drown out one of the many satirical teenage comedies on Nick Jr. my daughter loves in order to get a redraft of my novel finished. It’s a beautiful album, but hearing it after so many years made…

I’ve read a lot of complaints over Peter Jackson taking a short book and making a trilogy out of it merely to screw us all for extra cash. Bullshit.  Well, mostly. I don’t doubt it makes Time Warner a heap more money and I don’t doubt that to get all the big stars on board…

News coverage of Isis and Gaza recently has reminded me of Henry Fonda.  Specifically, the Henry Fonda thought experiment in Judith Jarvis Thomson’s landmark (and quite brilliant) paper ‘A Defense of Abortion’. ((Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 1, no. 1 (Fall 1971) )) For Thomson it’s a quite ghastly aside, the rejection of which (proximity…

How do you know what to believe? The internet has fragmented the ancient institutions that have shaped and disseminated knowledge and it has democratized facts in a way never before seen in human history. When deciding what to believe, and by corollary what moral and practical courses of action derive from those beliefs, anyone with…

Ricky Gervais’s new series of Derek has once again divided viewers and critics.  The show is a sentimental ‘mockumentary’ following, principally, four characters in a nursing home for the elderly.  I loved the first series, the final episode being as moving as the christmas special of The Office.  Many of the criticisms stem from a…

As someone learning the craft of writing, and leaving it rather late to do so, I need to read widely, and read writing of good quality so that I may learn from it.  It was inevitable I would become a neurotic reader. Anyone with a passion for books has or will come to the realisation…

In the UK in the last ten to fifteen years, there has been an explosion in the amount of us buying coffee while we’re out and about. With this boom, its headline acts being the big chains like Starbucks, Costas, Nero etc. the word ‘barista’ has reached the common lexicon, rarely confused now with the legal…

Writers have a problem.  It’s harder than it ever was to get published.  It’s also easier than it ever was to get published.

“How is it that we have created so much mental and emotional suffering despite levels of wealth unprecedented in human history?” (The Spirit Level) It’s not the sort of thing you can sort out in a blog entry, but there’s any number of things that don’t seem to add up when I think about British…

I’m stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a post-apocalyptic ruin, watching a man called Hannibal slowly lead a handful of worn-out looking former slaves and a diseased, mutated Brahmin bull to the headless statue of the former president.  On the back of the bull are some supplies and the stone head of Abraham…

Well, it’s my blog, I can do a ‘my favourite things’ if I want to.  What prompted it was this year’s christmas Radio Times.  For as long as I can remember I’ve enjoyed sitting down with it and reading through, picking out all the old films I’d like to watch, you know, ‘Meet Me in…

If our homes express who we are, what of the home where all of your literature and music is invisible to the casual eye; no trace of the stories and music that move you and define you represented alongside whatever art or furniture or decor you’ve put together to create a place that is special…

There’s an iron nail in my left knee the first half mile away from my front door, down the slope past the school, dozing in the silence of its lie-in on a bright Saturday morning. The nail, where my iliotibial band sticks itself to my knee, warms and melts away as I turn onto the…

I talked in my last blog-post about the pleasure I get from hard-working prose.  Good writing comes from the choices you make with the words you commit to the page.  In this blog-post I’m going to look at two scenes from my book Snakewood and explain what I was trying to achieve with them.  I…

What would you say constitutes great writing?  For a practising writer like me, good writing isn’t just about what is enjoyable to read, but also about the choices a writer makes when they select words to convey their message. I thought I’d try to articulate what great writing looks like to me, using an author…

Over the years I’ve been addicted to a number of games.  These include all the MMOs I’ve played, Championship Manager, Civilization, Elite, Just Cause 2 and Test Drive Unlimited.  And this was proper addiction, you know: “Oh shit it’s 4am, oh man, not again.” Five hundred calories a day on weekends (crisps, tea and chips) Tips and strategy…

“Sit down son.” Jerry’s mum and dad were on the sofa opposite him. This was his End Day, his sixteenth birthday, and so the day he would be told how long he had to live, the day the law said he had a right to know. His mum was biting her lip, her knuckles were…

I spend some time on an internet writing forum.  There have been a few forum threads that have exploded over the titular writing maxim.  One post in particular is based on some advice Chuck Palahniuk had written somewhere: ‘you may not use “thought” verbs.  These include:  Thinks, Knows, Understands, Realizes, Believes, Wants, Remembers, Imagines, Desires’…

This blog post gives an overview of my very physical take on ‘magic’ in the world of Snakewood. Now, inevitably, with a fantasy novel, you’re likely to have some sort of ‘magic’, something to make it fantastic in the purest sense. For Snakewood, perhaps because of my conceptual struggle, as a materialist, for magic, I…

I’m going philosophical in this post, so those of a disposition sensitive to pointless armchair theorising look away now. I’ve long been interested in Philosophy, but particularly interested in the brain, the most complex thing in the known universe, as far as I’m aware. In this post I want to explain why I think the mind is…

How to create a convincing fantasy world. That’s the question I’m sure all writers in the genre wrestle with at the outset.  You can get lost in it.  All such writers I’ve read on the forums I frequent vary in how deeply they imagine the setting for their story, prior to banging out the chapters….

I’ve wondered for a while what the use of analytics in driving game design would mean for games.  There are clearly massive benefits.  But along the way I think there are casualties, particularly when it comes to the uniqueness of a vision a designer has for the experience they’ve created.  The only time I’ve articulated…

“Surely if incredibly high sales of authors who don’t close edit their books teaches us one thing, it’s that in some parts of some genres editing is less important to readers than other factors…..the point about self-publishing is that every type of reader can find books that are for them so long as we stop…

I never played World of Warcraft (WOW). It could be a fatal caveat to the bag of opinions that follows, but, as Rushdie said of Don DeLillo’s magnum opus Underworld, WOW “fills the sky” where MMOs are concerned.  It must be acknowledged, a tip of the hat to the naked emperor from here onwards, as well…

The final sentence of Snakewood approached, already in my head, and I’m looking at the words unfold like I’m on a train thundering off the rails and over the cliff.