A work in progress…
Working on the superhero novella. I would describe the story as ‘Cronenberg’s Watchmen do Ghostbusters in South London’
Category: Writing journey
How To Tell A Story, by Wallace & Daughter
Art reproduced with kind permission of the artist, in this case my six-year-old daughter: Before telling a story, there are seven questions you should ask: 1: Who is the story about? 2: What do they want? 3: Why do they want it? 4: What is stopping them? 5: Why is it stopping them? 6: What […]
Super Relaxed Fantasy Club, Waterstones Tottenham Court Road, 27.09.16
Because a Super Relaxed Reality Club just wouldn’t work I was apprehensive about attending because I have a tendency to be tense. Would I be allowed in? And if I was, would there be enforced massage from a large troll of indeterminate gender wearing too much make-up and a Minion onesie? Or is that just, […]
Jeff Noon: Ghost of the Machine
Jeff Noon Interview by Gerard Earley at BSFA 27 January 2016 In the early 1990s, aspiring playwright Jeff Noon was working in the SF section of Waterstones in Manchester when he came across a non-fiction book detailing the technical aspects of virtual reality, a concept that had been explored with dazzling panache by William […]
How parenting affects creativity
Excerpt from a story I wrote when I was fifteen: Space Captain Wallace Andrews checked the data from his damaged starship as it drifted next to the asteroid belt. He had thirty minutes of air left. He chuckled to himself. He had single-handedly thwarted the invasion mounted by the alien Pril, not that anyone on […]
Diamond Roads Origins Part 7
The recording of ‘Wonderworld’ from journal entry Studio 6, BBC Maida Vale studios 14.00 to 18.30 8 February 2007. It was the Very Snowy Day that people had been treating like the approaching apocalypse all week. I put on my trainers instead of my boots, which later transpired to be a mistake and then had […]
Diamond Roads Origins Part 6
I wrote other spec scripts and sent those off to production companies and the BBC but no one was interested. I thought about evolving a novel out of one of them, a non-science fiction story set in a boys’ school, but the story was incredibly dark and I had become wary about wasting yet more […]
Diamond Roads Origins Part 5
Adapting ‘As Good As It Gets’ and hearing Charity’s unceasing voice in my head gave me the idea of writing ‘Diamond Roads’ as a novel so, over six months, I did. It was hugely exciting. Every day I would look forward to finding out what each character did. The evolution of the story came to […]
Diamond Roads Origins Part 4
I’d wanted to write a piece of TV science fiction for some time. I thought about ‘The Psychometric Man’ but I couldn’t call it that. In the meantime, ‘Engines of Creation’ by K Eric Drexler, a book that posited the idea of nanotechnology, had gradually been popularised since its publication in 1986. I started to […]
Life in Sci-Fi 