4 RPGs and What They Taught Me About Writing

I’m not a writing advice guy. There are a lot of writing advice guys out there, and a small number that will tell you practical, actionable things that you can put into practice, but in my experience, the vast majority of it is somewhere between Draw The Rest of the Fucking Owl and just… vibes. Most writers, including extremely talented professionals, do …

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Casting an Imaginary Fermi Series

I wrote Fermi’s Progress, and its sequel, Fermi’s Wake, because I was missing a very specific kind of old school TV sci-fi storytelling. But as I was writing a series of novellas, rather than a TV series, I felt that it was only fair to do everything in my power to make it completely unfilmable. The premise, a prototype faster-than-light spaceship that …

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Ranking The Rag-Tag Spaceship Crews of Videogames

If there is one thing I love it is a rag-tag bunch of misfits, each with their own agendas and emotional damage, who are forced to live and work together aboard a spaceship having adventures. And it is no surprise that my love of the spaceship-bound band of misfits is a big part of why I wrote Fermi’s Progress, my series …

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The Universe in A Room: One-Room Science Fiction

When I started writing Fermi’s Progress, it was with a clear mission statement. Planet of the week adventures. Just as the star of any Columbo story was a well-regarded character actor playing a pretentious douchebag who believed they had committed the perfect murder, the star of each Fermi story was going to be a new world, whose aliens were as …

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Where To Find Me at Edge-Lit 10

Only three days to go until the tenth Edge-Lit Derby, “an event which celebrates the best in Horror, Thriller, Fantasy and Science-Fiction writing”. It looks like it’s going to be a fantastic day, with tons of stuff on, but just to keep things easy I thought I’d write a quick summary of the most me-centric events that are going to …

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Who Killed NanoSessionMo?’s AI Stance

Was going to do a quick “Where I’ll Be” post about this weekend’s upcoming Edge-Lit convention. Instead, that will be coming later this week. In the meantime, it seems we have to do this. Next Saturday, at Edge-Lit Genre Fiction Festival, I am going to be running a workshop called Who Killed NanoSessionMo? where a group of strangers collaborate to …

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Why I Wrote Fermi’s Progress

Flogging a book is difficult, particularly if you’re going the indie route and your marketing team consists of your tweets and your girlfriend dutifully retweeting them when asked. Ideally, it’s not about selling the book. It’s about selling the first couple of pages of the book, and then hoping that the story you have put years of your life into …

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Event Announcement: Who Killed NanoSessionMo?

Come with me, if you will, back to the days of 2015. It was a time when the USA could honestly say it had never had Donald Trump as a President, a time when most normal people didn’t know what a “Brexit” was, when the 2012 Olympics were just a thing that had happened and the MCU still had seemingly …

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The Future History of Norwich – a Fan Fiction, Part 3

Continuing my look at the history of the Star Trek universe as seen from the perspective of Norwich, England. Last time we saw the long road getting to the Federation in the 22nd century. Now we turn to the 23rd and the 24th centuries, far from the frontier… It is 2259 in Norwich. The solar panels and windmills are completely …

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The Future History of Norwich – a Fan Fiction, Part 2

Continuing my look at the history of the Star Trek universe as seen from the perspective of Norwich, England. Last time we saw how Norwich fared through the darker chapters of the 21st century. This week we enter the 22nd century, and it has been a long road… It is 2100 in Norwich The skies are filled with fireworks and …

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