A pandemic is a highly weird time to be doing anything significant, as we all well know, because we're smack in the middle of a strange kind of limbo. There was the time before COVID, there will be the time after COVID, but its a real struggle to comprehend the time...

I think, maybe, pretty much, The PhD Novel, is complete. I think. Maybe. 

Well, it has to be because the deadline looms. But drawing a line underneath the thing and saying to myself: OK, stop now, has been almost as hard as writing it. Who was it that said a novel is ne...

I feel like every blog post I put up on here begins with me saying we are living in strange times, and that such times call for strange stories. But a global pandemic can't be be summed up with the word 'strange'. As a word, it seems to fail somehow; not weighty enough...

Coming up this Saturday, Nov 23rd, myself and some uni pals are taking over the gorgeous Engine House at The International Anthony Burgess Foundation for the first ever (and possibly last ever, who knows) installment of The Manchester Forum.

Brainchild of musician Liam...

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So: the PhD. How’s it going? It’s still going, chugging along in fits and starts, sometimes wailing through dark tunnels, sometimes rolling happily in beautiful scenery; sometimes slow, sometimes fast, with a shifting array of passengers passing through the carriage w...

There’s an event coming up in Manchester which I’m aiming to go to called ‘Rural Eerie: Exploring the Strange Countryside’ (Oct 19th, The Peer Hat). That term rural eerie has stuck with me as its something that I’m increasingly finding myself reaching towards in my fic...

I have emerged from my self-imposed writing zone having slaughtered various darlings. I entombed myself within an attic space, surrounded by farmlands in Walterstone, deepest Herefordshire. It was pretty much exactly on the border between England and Wales: I was physi...

In an unnerving turn of events, I’ve been encountering a lot of zones recently. You know the ones: fuzzy boundaries, decayed ‘keep out’ signage, nature take-overs, a looming sense of something being absolutely and 100% not quite right but still quite glorious. I’m read...

New story alert: the tip-top fellas at STORGY magazine (who published my weird Shakespearean tale 'Pentameter' in their Shallow Creek collection last year) have stuck up a story of mine on their awesome website. It's called 'A Panda Appeared on Our Street' and its a ta...

Last week I returned to Autscape, the autism-run conference/retreat which takes place once a year and has become something of an annual utopia for various autistic folk. I first went two years ago when I presented on the early stages of my project and reported back wit...