You're not supposed to feed the seagulls in the city because then they'll pester people for food.
But I like dinosaurs more than I like strangers.
#ScribesAndMakers 8 Jun
What's something you consider creative that other people might not?
Choosing what to remove rather than what to add.
#WordWeavers 8. Does your MC have strengths that others see as weaknesses?
That's a weird concept to me. A strength is a capability. Someone else could see a capability as not very useful, but that doesn't make it a weakness, just an irrelevant strength.
If a guy can pick up a car with actual […]
Now, I have a lot of reasons to hate vibe coding, but one of them is that I just think more easily in code. I reason by writing the code. It's not something I can easily disentangle.
Architectures tend to live in my head as pictures that change as I write. The words are code. There's no […]
Also they are the official/emblematic bird of my home town, East Kilbride, in spite of the fact we are not especially near the coast so you only ever see them very occasionally. I think you only ever see them at all because Scotland is quite small and not many places are so far from the coast […]
#WritersCoffeeClub 8 Jun
How vast are your settings?
Usually human-experience-sized: a town, a room, a sea voyage, an underground cavern, a forest.
The short story Ever Green is set in a place that is considerably larger, but it's about one lone character walking across it, so the action is […]
#ScribesAndMakers 9 Jun
If you had a chance to ask an author or artist (living or deceased) one question, what would it be?
I get to hang around living writers and artists sometimes (you can too! Join a writing group or go to cons and book festivals). Whenever I ask a question it'll be part of […]
I like oyster catchers, they're pretty birds, but it's a fairly stupid name. Oysters don't run around a lot. You could argue that they don't in fact need a lot of catching. We don't call cows grass catchers.
Oyster catchers also mostly don't even eat oysters, so that's a moot point.
#WordWeavers 7 Jun
Who is your most visually stunning character? How do others react to them?
I rarely make stunning looks a big part of characterisation. I suppose Aena in The Source of Fire is striking. She's not fashionably pretty—short and solidly built—but she's charismatic, clever, and […]
#WritersCoffeeClub 9 Jun
Have you ever written something which later turned out to be a little too on the nose?
If anything, I tend to be too indirect or even obscure. I legit wrote a murder story where the main mystery is the murder weapon, and didn't reveal it explicitly.
Readers, your nose […]
