Madgeniusclub has an interesting article for SF&F writers on building web presence: 1- Be you. Don’t try to sound educated, or professorial or anything of the kind, unless that is who you are, naturally. Just be you. I swear readers can smell “Phony” a mile off.
Online self-segregation gets written about a lot these days. That’s where people never encounter anyone who disagrees on Facebook and Twitter. They’ve unfriended or unfollowed dissenters on Facebook or are victims of software that tailors information to their worldview. But what happens if you leave your filter bubble? Well, about eighteen months
The 2016 Hugo Awards for science fiction had their ceremony on 20th August. Last year I closely followed the awards, after reading news stories alleging that US conservatives were trying to keep women authors out of SF. This year I didn’t vote, but posted the video below on
Earlier this summer I pitched my (unfinished) novel to Baen Books‘ Contributing Editor Gray Rinehart at a face-to-face critique session at LibertyCon, a three-day sci-fi and fantasy literature convention in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Unusually for a modern publisher, Baen takes unsolicited manuscripts. Gray is the Slushmaster General – a job,
The Water That Falls on You From Nowhere won a Hugo Award for short science fiction & fantasy in 2014. The story is about Matt ‘coming out’ to his traditional Chinese parents in a world where water falls on you when you lie. I loved the
The short unspoilered version: The good news: This is a good film. Not as good as the original films, but infinitely better than the prequels. You can safely wipe the horror of them from your memory. Call this Episode IV of the series and get on with
Jessica slumped against the inside of the truck door. The girl behind the wheel […] kept stealing glances at her. Jessica ignored them, just like she tried to ignore the itchy pull and tug deep inside her, under her belly button, where the aliens were trying
Folding Beijing, a novelette published in Uncanny Magazine, depicts a fantastical future Beijing where the skyscrapers fold and unfold like origami in a forty-eight-hour cycle. Each time the city folds, a new space is revealed, and its inhabitants begin their day. Five million enjoy the use of twenty-four hours and seventy-five
Everyone else has opinions on Donald Trump. I’m British, but we’ve getting plenty of coverage over here. So, hey, why shouldn’t I join in the fun. 1. No, I’m not going to point and yell “fascist”. Yep, Trump’s egotism and nativism is somewhat 1930s jackboots-&-genocide, but fascism is mostly
By four o’clock I’d wound up taking photos of a 1950s power station in a town on the Kent coast where I had no sane reason to be. I was down on travel options, I was out of daylight, and the only constructive thing I’d done in