Articles from August 2010

Weird and unlikely things happen when you distribute your work for free over the internet. And it seems that my story The Human Factor has been downloaded from Feedbooks and uploaded to Scribd. I’m not sure how I feel about this. I guess the guy who did just liked the story, which is good and [...]

A bit less blogging recently because I have been concentrating on managing the flow of submissions to Alt Hist. We’ve had quite a good number of submissions in and I am received to say that a lot of these are good enough to be published. Some have not quite made the grade, but so far [...]

Fact is stranger than fiction, and fiction is nothing unless it tells the truth. Powerful and moving stories often tell us something true about life, about the world and about ourselves, even if the details have been manufactured inside the author’s brain. The Kite Runner, one of the most popular more high-brow novels of recent [...]

Sounds pretty top drawer to me – and I thought all Cheltenham was famous for was horse racing! Here’s details of the event: Iain M Banks, Gwyneth Jones, Michael Moorcock and China Miéville: British Science Fiction Sunday 17 October 2010 at 4:00 pm (60mins) Event 317 at The Inkpot Price: £6 (reserved seating) (member price: £4.80) more From [...]

From Canto I of Dante’s Inferno: Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered off from the straight path. These are the opening lines to Dante’s great poem, and probably the most famous poem of the Middle Ages. What better way to start [...]

Interesting talk on Science Fiction being promoted at the Cheltenham Literature Festival on Saturday, 16th October. Some people you might have heard of are involved, see below for the organizer’s blurb: Are you open-minded about science fiction but don’t know where or how to start? For an introduction to some recommended reads and an expert [...]

Funny Video courtesy of brothersgrimandgrimy. All you need to know about Cthulhu! I like how New Zealand is now labelled Middle Earth! Originally spotted at SF Signal. Incoming search terms:cthulhu middle ages

After a long time looking distinctly poor, I have updated the Writing section of my blog. You can now find out what I have published where and also read some extracts as well of the published stuff. Everything is much better organized now I hope! You can also find out about my current writing projects, [...]

Ghostmaker by Dan Abnett is the first Warhammer or Warhammer 40k tie-in novel that I have read. When I was a teenager I was an enthusiastic player of Warhammer and to a lesser extent Warty Thou as we we called Warhammer 40K. The Black Library books have now become a publishing force in their own [...]

There’s an odd illogicality to this story – the medieval stones are only 114 years old?? Interesting though that such a large scale bakery would exist in a village – you would imagine most villagers would bake their own. I wonder what was going on? The full story is at Culture 24 Here’s an excerpt: [...]