Category Archives: Blog

I’m reading from the House of Three poetry anthology at the Lit and Phil on Wednesday 23rd Nov, with other terrific poets including Margorie Lotfi Gill, Tessa Berring, Nalini Paul, and Katy Ewing.

I seem to be a bit obsessed with apples, they’ve appeared in my writing in all sorts of different ways. The first apple was fairly obvious. I was writing a short story about Alan Turing and it’s known that he died as a result of cyanide poisoning. Andrew Hodge’s biography suggests that this was suicide, […]

On the afternoon of November 25, 1915 Einstein gave a lecture to the Prussian Academy of Science about his new general theory of relativity and as a result our universe changed. Prior to this, our understanding of how things worked relied on Newton’s laws. He imagined a set of rulers and a clock measuring universal […]

Michael Gove has been in the news a lot lately. For those of you readers lucky enough not to know who Michael Gove is, he’s the UK Government Minister responsible for education in England (fortunately not here in Scotland or elsewhere in the UK). He’s been in the news a lot lately for a variety […]

Vicki Jarrett, fabulous short story writer and author of ‘Nothing is Heavy’ (published by Linen press and short-listed for the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award 2013) suggested I take part in this latest blog-tour-interview-yourself arrangement. This one is all about the ‘writing process’ which made me nervous because I’m not sure […]

Recently I’ve been reading about quantum physics in another (futile) attempt to understand it. I studied it years ago as part of my degree, and I’ve read umpteen books about it. The first book I ever read about it – when I was a teenager – was ‘The Dancing Wu Li Masters’. Before that I’d […]

Thought I’d take a breather from my usual level of pontificating and write about some more practical stuff, such as some interesting things/events that I have/will be part of: Nice events  in the future: I’m reading at the Dunbar Literary Festival on 18th June, with fellow New Writer Awardees Andrew Sclater, Katy McAulay, and Erika […]

When I started writing my novel, I knew I wanted to explore the effect of an apparent challenge to the Big Bang theory upon an individual character as well as the astronomical community as a whole. But what form could this challenge take? The theory is based on several well-established pieces of observational evidence, principally […]

People have asked me what genre I write, and I’ve often been introduced at events as a science fiction author. It’s not how I see myself, but who’s to say that they’re wrong? The boundary between ‘literary’ fiction (which I think I write) and science fiction is so blurred it may not be a proper […]