Category Archive

So after years of thinking about it and months of gathering information on what such a group might actually do, I’ve finally made my own writer’s group on Meetup.com called London Indie Writers. http://www.meetup.com/London-Indie-Writers/ So far it has two other members: they’re both ladies, one writes romance with a high level of success, and the other writes ‘cli-fi’, or climate fiction, or science fiction about climate change. Both of them pass the group requirement of one book out with at least reviews. I’m looking forward to meeting them and talking shop. Why make this group? Because there’s strength in numbers. …

My site was down the last few days- nobody knows why, not me, not my hosting service, nobody- so apologies about that if you were checking in and getting rebuffed. I spent a few days fixing it, with a lot of trial-and-error installing, deleting, reinstalling, moving around, password changing, syncing and other stuff later, and now it is back- with only a few of the more recent posts (and comments- sorry!) missing. Was it the 4000 comments piled up in the spam queue? Was it a hacker collaborative angered by my opinions about The Martian? Was it the fault of …

We bought a Bible! Actually I should say we donated for a Bible, as it was offered to us for free when we went to church again today. Church AGAIN?! Yes church again, but not the brainwashing rock-out of the family service we went to last time, instead back to the regular solemnity of a proper service. Now that the structure of these things is familiar to us, I start to wonder how the vicar manages to do all the repetitive readings he has to do and not go a bit mad with it. “We have to do this every …

I take a keen interest in U.S. politics, regularly listening to podcasts of Meet The Press, Bill Maher’s Real Time and Fareed Zakaria’s GPS. I used to watch CNN’s State of the Union too but that on top of the others was a bit much even for me. Why do I take this interest? Cynically I will say that U.S. politics is my spectator sport. It certainly is presented quite a lot like entertainment. Non-cynically I would say it is because I believe the battles in U.S. politics are both interesting and extremely important. The decisions America makes will reverberate …

Last weekend while I was in Leicester Cathedral, standing by the sleek new tomb for car park King Richard 3, I cast my eye delicately over the tombstones built into the walls and stumbled upon this little beauty. Humble bragging was a thing even in 1743. What is humble bragging? Bragging about how humble you are. Look at this for the form raised to an art: Of a most extensive learning, in his own profession eminent Not aspiring after more Preferments, of much greater Deserving, Possessed of many Shining Qualities, which his Modesty would have concealed. Not bad. Of course, …

Amazon offers a number of statistics to authors who publish through them- one of them being Author Rank. I don’t know exactly what goes into calculating it, but it’s most likely a combination of the sales rank (number of sales combined with recency of sales) of all an author’s books, plus perhaps something for number of reviews and maybe even score of those reviews. I started publishing on Amazon 2 years ago with my 2 collections of short stories, Ignifer’s Rise followed, then my ruins book, then the Ruins War, then zombie books. It’s nice to note there is an …

Last week on Friday we eschewed our normal ‘rush-home-to-watch-TV-and-work/study’ plan and instead went out to the late night opening of the Tate Modern. Now that is living the London-life. I have no doubt that soon we’ll be out partying with Twiggy and Princess Margaret. We started by St. Paul’s, went to a burger joint called Porky’s where SY had ribs with a Dr. Pepper sauce and I had the Porky burger with a ‘Porkslap’ beer. Johnny Cash played throughout. Then we did the Tate, which was good but is never as good as the Tate traveling exhibition we saw on …

I just wrote a chase/fight scene for Zombie Ocean 3, between Cerulean AKA Robert and a zombie. Question- Has there ever been a character in a wheelchair in popular zombie lore? It makes for an interesting flip of perspective. Trying to imagine myself into the head and body of a paraplegic person is a challenge. Absent a wheelchair, it’s basically all crawling- dragging these motionless legs behind you like a penance. Hard to escape. It was the same kind of challenge to write from Anna’s perspective, a 5-year old girl, in Book 2 The Lost. She just couldn’t do much. …

I’m an English teacher, I teach students who come from all around the world and want to study at University in the UK. I teach them English, Academic Skills, and a bit of Business English. Term just started, so I was ‘breaking in’ 6 groups of students. This is always the most wearying time, as any issues with discipline need to be dealt with immediately (you wouldn’t think it was an issue with 18-years old+ students, but a bad attitude in the first class is only going to lead to more problems later on), you need to get to know …