I posted this to Facebook four years ago, when some folks who refused to acknowledge systemic bias decried any suggestion there might be an element of racism in their actions. Computers have evolved since the seventies and eighties. Cars have evolved, banking has evolved, food has evolved. Your iPhone is a very different beast than […]
Print copies of The Seventeen Executions of Signore Don Vashta landed in my mailbox today, and they’ve come up rather beautifully for a thirty-page chapbook. About half the very short print run are already spoken for, heading off to various friends and authors I’m courting for future projects who wanted to see how the chapbooks […]
Comics writer Kieron Gillen sent out his latest newsletter yesterday, which featured a line-up of his top music tracks of 2019. Gillen’s got a background as a DJ, and writes some pretty awesome music-inspired works, and his newsletter has introduced me to a bunch of music I would have overlooked. He introduced The Comet Is […]
In the early days of my newsletter I posted a link to Maggie Steifvater’s journaling approach, designed to manage uneven energy levels after she contracted a long-term illness that kept her from writing. The original post is gone now—along with the rest of Steifvater’s Tumblr—but the lesson from it has lived with me on-and-off in […]
I’m reading Dreamsongs at the moment, George R.R. Martin’s big retrospective collection of short stories, and the introductions where Martin gets salty are among my favourite things. Particularly this one, from Doing the Wild Card Shuffle, where he talks about a failed attempt to get a job at Marvel and how his love of comics […]
We finished watching the third season of Riverdale last night, and my mouth dropped at the sheer and wondrous audacity of a twist in the penultimate episode where a secret was revealed. It was a moment that delivered what I’d loved in Riverdale’s first season–a well-honed twist that changed the direction of a story, and […]
It’s been twenty-five years since I first saw Hackers, and not a week goes by where I don’t find myself tempted to start an email with “Ola, Boys and Girls,” in an attempt to find my people. Filmmakers really should have done more with Matthew Lillard.
I often joke about treating my phone and bullet journal as externalised parts of my memory, treating it like a new phenomenon. Truth is, it’s been a habit ever since I first got bookshelves, where there’s always a short chunk of shelf space given over to references for projects I’m working on. Case in point, […]
I just did the Brain Jar Press newsletter and realised I’d put together four new releases across January: Exile, a new short story collection, a new chapbook in the Short Fiction Lab line, and the chapbook edition of The Seventeen Executions of Signore Don Vashta. Amid the chaos of January, some of these didn’t even […]
I woke at sunrise this morning, courtesy of the cat attacking my feet and then ruthlessly demanding attention for twenty minutes. She spent a good chunk of last night stalking a gecko, and I suspect she failed to capture it going by this morning’s behaviour. I would be mad at her, but there’s 40 emails […]
I wrote a rough plan for February, because January has been one of those months where I’ve been reacting to deadlines and my brain is doing a very bad job of figuring where my focus needs to be. I love a good whiteboard that takes that decision away from me and says, “Here. Your focus […]
As you may have surmised from the posts of the past few days, EXILE is out today. It also ends my first real experiment with a planned, structured series of content heading into the launch cycle. It’s been an experience, and one that I’m glad to have attempted, but I’m glad to be reaching the […]
