After 29 years, I finally returned to the magical mountain town of Banff, Alberta, Canada. If you’ve never visited, Banff is probably the most beautiful place I’ve ever been to. I first went as a boy, en route home from Expo 86, and blogged about it for the awesome Canadian literature blog 49th Shelf. It […]
This week I’m heading to Banff, Alberta for the World Media Festival. I’m wearing my TV hat (not my cowboy hat) this week, meeting with producers and broadcasters on the Awesome slate of drama projects we’ve been cooking up. It’s a different process to writing books, but not that different. It’s still about story, character, […]
I played my first Hay Festival this week! If you don’t know, Hay is like the Glastonbury for books…or the ComicCon for literature. It’s a huge festival in a tiny town. The organizers (who must be super organised) set up a tent city in a field, complete with bookshops, bars, restaurants, a swishy green-room, and […]
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 […]
