I didn’t watch zombie movies as a kid. We lived in a small town with limited TV reception, and the nearest cinema was hundreds of kilometres away. Movies were hard to find, and horror movies were always way down the list of things to see. Particularly after a series of school camps, where my 4th […]
In which we celebrate the launch of Val Vega: Secret Ambassador of Earth, but Ben Fransisco…
Miriam Aster made a big mistake: she fell in love with the Queen of the Fey. All this was ten years ago, when Miriam was an up-and-coming homicide detective and fairies were things out of fairy tales. Miriam met the queen of the fey in a bar, felt a rush of attraction, and soon they […]
Last week, I ran a bunch of writing workshops for Villanova College here in Brisbane. Four workshops spread over three days, focused on writing a crime story in 900 words. My year of producing original short fiction for Patreon came in incredibly handy, since I have a lot of thoughts on how to curtail your […]
Back in April I stayed awake until 1:00 AM and recorded an hour-long chat with for Mark Leslie Lefebvre’s Stark Reflections podcast. It went live last week, and over the course of the interview we tackle many writing and publishing topics, including my start as an RPG publisher in the pre-Kindle days of the early […]
I recently posted my 40th weekly Saturday Morning Story to Patreon, which is a patently absurd sentence to write given I started this project under the belief I could no longer finish anything. I honestly believed I’d have a burst of enthusiasm, produce stories for six weeks, then I’d curl up in a ball and […]
My birthday is the 18th of March. The anniversary of my father’s death is the 19th of March. This one-two punch often catches me off-guard, a double-whammy of anxiety and guilt that throws me off my game despite my belief that I’m feeling fine. As mentioned in the authors note for this week’s Saturday Morning […]
Today’s my forty-sixth birthday, so I’m kicking off today’s post with the traditional unflattering birthday selfie. I gather these have long been robbed of their power to horrify my mother, but I kinda dig having an ongoing archive of my rarely-photographed face to reflect on as the years go by. This year, my birthday falls […]
The long-delayed delivery from my printer arrived yesterday and I finally got the chance to see both issues of Eclectic Projects side-by-side for the first time. In a lot of ways, these magazine issues are my platonic ideal of a book: 80 to 100 pages, self-contained, with a standardised design creating unity as things progress. […]
As ever, you can read the story over at Patreon for as little as a buck a month—which gets you all thirty-eight of the stories thus far—or grab it when it comes out in a forthcoming issue of the Eclectic Projects magazine. ON THE DOCKET Today is an admin and chores day, where I run […]
This week has been an embarrassment of riches regarding writing and publishing news, and just as I was thinking about how strange it would be to write a blog post with nothing big to share… BAM, the Aurealis Awards shortlists dropped with two Brain Jar Press titles included among the finalists (and many more authors […]
OUT IN THE WORLD I recently guested on the Pratchat podcast hosted by Ben McKenzie and Elizbath Flux, talking about Terry Pratchett’s non-fiction collection A Slip Of The Keyboard and the writing advice within. You can find the episode online now, or at any of the mysterious services that bring podcasts to your phone. Here’s […]
