Writer of books and plays. Also: geek, chap, dad, absurdist.
It’s mid-afternoon on Saturday 13 October 1979. I’m seven years old and I’m in the living room of my grandparent’s house at 85 Kenilworth Road, Aston, Birmingham. Out the window I can hear the crowds at the Aston Villa ground roaring in appreciation of another goal. When I hear the unmistakeable final roar that signifies […]
Occasionally I lose my tiny mind and I pick a lost Doctor Who story, grab up everything about it that I can and devote a week to deep diving into it. This week it was the third season historical The Massacre, produced under the aegis of script editor Donald Tosh (who Loose Cannon interviewed about the […]
Yesterday the Department for Culture, Media and Sport renamed itself the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. I ran digital comms for the DCMS for about a year 2009/10 (honest, I did), a period which covered the last six months of the Labour government and the first six months of the coalition. During the […]
My first trilogy of novels, collected in School’s Out Forever, were set within the shared world of Abaddon’s Afterblight Chronicles. They’re pretty good, and you should totally pick up a copy (hint! hint!) Ahem, anyway… this August a new Afterblight omnibus is released containing three novellas: Fall Out by Simon Guerrier, which is a sequel to my […]
Twenty five years ago I visited a town in Poland called Starachowice. Since WW2 it had been a town that produced trucks – Star Trucks – and almost nothing else. When I visited, in the early 90s, the factory had closed and unemployment was through the roof. The town felt lost, abandoned, the populace shocked […]
It began when three people from three different moments in history discovered that they could travel through time when they clasped hands. But the mysteries surrounding them have only deepened.
TimeBomb publishes 9 October 2014. Pre-order – paperback | ebook New York City, 2141: Yojana Patel throws herself off a skyscraper, but never hits the ground. Cornwall, 1640: gentle young Dora Predennick, newly come to Sweetclover Hall to work, discovers a badly-burnt woman at the bottom of a flight of stairs. When she reaches out to comfort […]
So the secret’s finally out. If you’ve been following me on Twitter or Facebook you’ll know I recently finished and delivered a book. You’ll possibly have realised it’s a time-travel story, and if you’ve really been paying attention you’ll have guessed it’s called Timebomb. It’s the first of a three-book deal I signed with Hodder […]
So the first draft of the next book is done! It currently clocks in at 91,437 words, which makes it longer than any of my Afterblight books. But as it goes through my editing process, then my agent’s, then my editor’s, that number will change many times. It’s been the most difficult book that I’ve […]
Two great blogs about the relationship between author and reader floated across my screen today: The first by the always brilliant John Scalzi – How to Be a Good Fan The second by Brenna Clarke Gray over at BookRiot – Readers Don’t Owe Authors Sh*t For my part I’ve not been doing this long enough, […]