My year so far has been caught up with sleep deprivation and illness, an inevitable Covid infection turning the last weeks into a zombie state of dead time, old cartoons and black-and-white films on Youtube. I can't believe half of 2022 has slipped away from me. The early months of the year had also seen … Continue reading Interzone Digital
Tag: writing
SF Crowsnest Review
Very pleased (not to mention grateful) for the following review of my little science fiction book, Requiem For An Astronaut. 'I liked everything about this [book]. Bart is a perfect narrator with a calm, observant, slightly jaded point of view that doesn’t lapse into cheap cynicism. His style is relaxed and his musings reveal much … Continue reading SF Crowsnest Review
Requiem For An Astronaut
I'm very pleased that my first science fiction novella, Requiem For An Astronaut, has been published by New Con Press. Requiem is set in the environs of East City, the location for my recent SF stories, and features a scientist, Bart, and his search for the lost astronaut Joan Kaminsky. An excerpt follows below. 'I … Continue reading Requiem For An Astronaut
Morphrog 23
I have five (not so easy) pieces in the most recent edition of Morphrog online magazine, including a prose poem, 'Birches'. Here's an excerpt: 'I found myself in a small copse of young birches: a damp smell of humus and fresh rain, the sky closed and white, the onset of spring heralded in distant, waxy … Continue reading Morphrog 23
I Liked To Take The Trains
I liked to ride the Docklands railway in those days, sitting at the very front of the electric trains, when they were being driven by an operator at the back. As we zipped around the waterfront of the Thames, following rails set on an overpass of raised concrete, I thought of myself as living in … Continue reading I Liked To Take The Trains
Weather
Now that I have moved to the tower, I'm positioned closer to the weather, pushed up against the atmosphere and affected by its changes. Even though I live in the city, and look over the skyline from my vantage point, I feel remote and outcast, as though I've renounced my urban life for some sort … Continue reading Weather
Tentacular 6
My poem 'After The Beach' is now live on Tentacular Magazine. Black rock parts the sand,sleek as porpoise finspoised for the depths or launched from prehistory.We buried ourselves here,accumulated like time or metal work, the sandshuffled out of geography.The ship on the horizon pulls us into its nets.Neither of us drew the map:here be dragons, … Continue reading Tentacular 6
The Novelist
At this time of year, as summer builds and I head to the coast, I remember my old ambition to be a novelist. This usually comes with a sense of embarrassment and regret. I've written a few novels, and they've been mostly unsuccessful, although I'm lenient enough on myself to think of this as a … Continue reading The Novelist
Clean
I think of those days often, when I seemed to spend my life on trains. In some ways, I've never left that journey, and the landmarks along the way have assumed the importance of personal ciphers. The dead tree at the centre of a marsh, pale as bone. The clearing at the edge of a … Continue reading Clean
Automated Houses
I visited an old acquaintance, a performance poet who had left the city some years before, and moved to the wilds of the north. Our friendship had always been tentative and slightly awkward, in that I had little respect for his work, and he, I knew, felt the same about mine. Still, after many years … Continue reading Automated Houses
Absence Club 