Writer of books and plays. Also: geek, chap, dad, absurdist.
In 2004 I made my acting debut for Big Finish. Well, I say ‘acting’ I was playing a news reader, so it was hardly Hamlet. I remember trying to be very naturalistic and being told by the director to make it a bit more ‘Day Today’, so I made it hammier and that got the thumbs up. I […]
Damn it, that Guerrier chap tagged me in a writers Q&A meme and I’m bound to follow suit or my entrails will be forfeit to Lord Beelzebub and his horde of demonic kittenbats. (Also, it will help prevent me writing a 10,000 word screed on the unbelievable corporate fuckwittery that is the Hellblazer cancellation.) Since Guerrier, and […]
I started this year with a long list of shit I needed to get done, some personal, some professional. The personal stuff has gone damn well, thanks for asking 🙂 On the professional front, I needed to get my hand back in to writing after a year off. I picked four projects and worked through […]
Online conversation I nearly had today but didn’t quite, because, well, life’s too short. In fact, I spent years having variations of this conversation on Compuserve, Usenet, eGroups, Yahoogroups, Listserves et al. I achieved nothing, but somehow I’m still occasionally amazed by people who are still randomly either rude or stupid. Or both. I try […]
In 2005 I was lucky enough to contribute a Doctor Who short story to a Christmas-themed anthology from Big Finish – Short Trips: A History of Christmas , which was edited by Simon Guerrier. It’s long out of print, and I certainly can’t charge for it, but I don’t think there’s any rule against me giving it […]
Some years ago, browsing through a second hand bookshop, I stumbled across a TV tie-in book for a show called 1990. I was instantly intrigued. A BBC drama starring Edward Woodward as Jim Kyle, heroic leader of a resistance movement in totalitarian Britain? How is it that I had never heard of this show? And how […]
A few years ago, Counting Crows kind of stunned everyone by walking away from Geffen and announcing they were an independent band. Whether this was prompted by a perceived underperformance of the superb ‘Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings’ or a wider dissatisfaction with the music business is unclear. But band leader Adam Duritz’s impassioned talk […]
Last summer I was lucky enough to do some writing for the forthcoming computer game Sniper Elite V2. Basically this meant doing some plotting, developing the narrative and scripting a bunch of cut-scenes and voiceovers. It was loads of fun and has now led to this press release, hot and shiny from the, um, press […]
Here’s a piece I’ve dredged up from the archives – early 2004, to be precise. At the time I was working for the BBC’s Top of the Pops website, which occasionally involved interviewing guests who had come to the studio to play on that week’s show. The highlight was when I got to have a […]
Back in the dim and distant I wrote a book all about a TV show called Farscape – Uncharted Territory. That book covered the first three seasons of the show and was commissioned by Virgin Books just as the SciFi Channel in America announced they’d be making seasons 4 and 5, so I was confident […]