Hello, all!

Those nice people at Big Finish have just put up my new collection of short stories on their website, available for pre-order!

I am very excited about this. It's my first book since Tiny Deaths, which picked up the World Fantasy Award last year. And like it, it's a series of quirky stories - some of them funny, some of them a bit ( Read more... )

Hello!

Oof. I haven't written on here for ages. But let's be honest - I haven't been in the country for ages either. Not really. I went out and bought a laptop some little while ago, simply so that when I'm in some strange city I could feel I wasn't entirely cut off from my family and friends. What I've discovered, though, is that I'm rubbish at ( Read more... )

This last month, after my daily spell of writing, I've mostly spent my time cramming my way through Flemish literature. There are reasons for this, it's not just the fact that I'm caught in some strange masochistic urge. (Though halfway through the seminal 1860 classic, Max Havelaar, or The Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company, something ( Read more... )

...A very Happy New Year ( Read more... )

Hello!

Okay - so what's the deal with air conditioning in North American hotels? When I was in Calgary six weeks ago, it was chilly outside, but inside the Hyatt it was as warm as toast. And after a few days spent there, the dryness of that air conditioning did weird things to my throat. But that was nothing to spending Thanksgiving in Chicago at a ( Read more... )

I've kind of resisted writing about the World Fantasy Awards for the last few weeks for a number of reasons. Partly because it was such a strange whirl I'm still not *entirely* sure I understood it, or what was going on - and therefore can't quite believe that I actually came back from the thing clutching one of the statuettes in question. (Well, ( Read more... )

Forty-five years. Who would have believed it?

It seems like only yesterday that I gathered all the family around the portable television device, to see this spanking new educational series about a medical practitioner who didn't know his own surname. I was magically transported to another world - of school classrooms, and junkyards, and corridors. ( Read more... )

This is my last night at home. ...Well, obviously not forever. I mean, I'll be back one day. In fact, to be more specific... I'll be back next Wednesday. Which doesn't sound very dramatic a departure at all, quite frankly. I'll be back just in time for Guy Fawkes' Night, on which date, every year, Janie and I make our way to the nearest common and ( Read more... )

Hi, everyone ( Read more... )

I'm feeling cautiously celebratory. The last time I felt this celebratory was a couple of weeks ago, for no especially good reason, and to commemorate that I took Janie off to the South of France for a few days. There's a lovely town there called Carcassonne which boasts a huge medieval walled city on the top of the hills - as you fly in on the ( Read more... )