Strategic use of pomodoros

My life is in a very different place now than at the start of the year. One of the bigger changes is working at Writers’ Centre Norwich, a hugely ambitious and progressive organisation which always has a dizzying array of active projects, where I’m tasked with using skills both familiar and unfamiliar to navigate a complex political and cultural landscape involving all kinds of external partners and stakeholders.

I’ve had to  completely redefine my understanding of words like ‘challenging’ and ‘busy’. I wasn’t using them correctly before, it turns out. (more…)

How to write serialised fiction

I’ve started publishing a how-to guide all about writing serialised fiction. It’s an approach to writing which I tried with A Day of Faces to a fair bit of a success, especially in terms of banishing my usual procrastination, so hopefully the guide will help others do the same. A […]

Evinden: rescuing a novel

It’s been a long time since I blogged about Evinden, my long-gestating fantasy novel. The last time, apparently, was in July 2013, and that was only an oblique mention. I have to delve back to the heady days of February 2011 to find a proper mention, at which point I’m talking […]

A Day of Faces

What if everyone born on the same day looked the same? Read it for free on Wattpad Read it for free on Inkitt In Kay’s world, weird is normal. Girls have tentacle dreads, there’s a ruling class of flying angels, some folk have fur or horns and others can see […]

The Mechanical Crown

Your world isn’t as perfect as you thought. Read it for free on Wattpad! The valley is ringed by impassable mountains; it is an isolated place where people live out their lives quietly. That is, until a new arrival triggers events which will tear the society apart… The Mechanical Crown […]

Going Up

An interactive experiment in natural conversation Born out of a curiosity to see how detailed a branching conversation can be, Going Up is a small anecdote of two guys stuck in a very slow lift. As one of the guys, you get to choose how the conversation goes: do you acknowledge the […]

Virtual photography gets easy

By which I mean that it’s technically far more achievable than previously; the ability to take good images is a whole other thing, just as DSLRs have made professional quality photography available to all without putting photogs out of business.*

I’m specifically referring to game photography here – the art of taking great screenshots, essentially. Games are inherently visual and always have been, with screenshots being part of their marketing since the earliest days. Three distinct changes have occurred which make taking in-game images suddenly more interesting. (more…)

I lost my spaceship in No Man’s Sky

I wrote a while back that I only started enjoying Far Cry 3 when I applied my own artificial restrictions to its free-form playground (in that case, using only the bow, despite the plethora of weaponry on offer). Taking an accidentally similar approach to No Man’s Sky, I gave myself a similar limiter: not having a spaceship. In this instance, though, it was entirely accidental. (more…)

No Man’s Sky reminds me of Morrowind

No Man’s Sky is more or less exactly what I wanted it to be. It could absolutely be so much more, and I hope Hello Games keep innovating and pushing it forward, but it’s already something unique and remarkable. The most surprising aspect for me is that it’s recaptured the magic of a very different game:Morrowind, the Elder Scrolls game that preceded Oblivion and Skyrim. (more…)