I usually don’t get political online, and keep this blog for musings on creativity, the arts, and general geekiness. But here in the UK we’ve got big day tomorrow and I thought I’d share my perspective…which is worth just one vote. I’m voting Labour. For me, the choice is about ethos and orientation. I choose […]
This week I’ve been back in Canada, in the Toronto area, launching all four MetaWars books! It was great to be back, see old friends and make new ones. I thought I’d share a few highlights…. Flying over, I was starting to wish I’d packed my toque (that’s Canadian for winter hat)… The weather in […]
This week, while on book tour in Canada, I guest blogged on the fantastic website 49th Shelf, a site that celebrates Canadian literature. In the spirit of giving them the web traffic they deserve, please click here for my piece on mining memories to create new fiction. I hope you enjoy…and maybe while you’re on […]
I write fiction about the future, but that doesn’t mean the future I invent is fictitious. And while I can’t study the future the way historical novelists can study the past, I can, and do, extrapolate today’s trends into future possibilities. And I say possibilities, because it’s my hope that in some small part, my books […]
Yesterday at the London Book Fair, I participated in a panel hosted by publisher Lisa Edwards about boys and men reading. If you know me well, you know this is a subject I’m passionate about. I was a reluctant reader as a boy, and getting (and keeping) boys reading guides my writing. My goal is to […]
Right now, most of the children’s book world is in Bologna, Italy. The rest of us are busy writing! For the uninitiated, the annual Bologna Book Fair is a massive market in children’s book rights. Sarah McIntyre has done a groovy blog post on it, which you can read here. It’s like a big […]
I finally saw The Nether last night, Jennifer Haley’s award-winning play about the consequences of living life in a virtual world. It was gripping and disturbing, raising important questions at the outset of a new digital age. Of course for me, what was most interesting was that many of the themes are core MetaWars concepts: – The […]
You’d have to be locked in the truck of a car to avoid the “news” of Jeremy Clarkson’s suspension from the wildly popular Top Gear TV show for allegedly striking a producer. Now, I don’t know Mr. Clarkson personally, though I don’t care for his public persona (he basically strikes me a a bully), but […]
This week I’ll be trading the London drizzle for the sunshine of Miami…well, at least the indoor air-conditioning of a conference hotel. For the first time ever, Kidscreen, the annual get together of the global kids media industry, will swap Manhattan for Miami. I first went to Kidscreen back in 2004, when I was a […]
So, The Sun newspaper may have finally decided to join the 20th century and change it’s Page 3, but from what I’ve seen on twitter this morning it’s only moved from semi-naked to scantily clad. Hardly a great leap forward, and real waste of an amazing opportunity. The Sun has the power and reach to showcase […]
