A Great School
“I saw a frog!” a girl or boy might say. So that day we would learn about frogs, and draw, or even make, frogs.
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Ten Basic But Important Rules For Authors
1. Never expect anyone to read your book, even if you sent it to them for free. Do all you can to keep yourself in a non-presumptive state that will lead to a feeling of pleasant surprise if a fellow human reads your book. 2. Don’t let people whose
Remembering A Very Special Cat (2001-2021)
Ralph
Extracts From My Notebooks
Subscribe now * You can listen to me reading this to you out loud here if you’d like to: * I’m extremely pro purchasing new notebooks but extremely anti wasting paper. It causes me to lead quite a turbulent life, full of internal conflict. Sure, sex is great but have
My Crowdependency Problem
Here we see a very, very normal morning scene in rural Devon, UK: a writer gets up, makes himself a coffee and finds a crow in his living room, striking theatrical poses and showing off to the less privileged birds who have to make do with living outside. You might
Edwin Starr's Redemptive Jellyfish Journey And How It Helped Him Learn To Be A Person Again
Subscribe now The big mistake people who’ve never had writer’s block usually make in their assumptions about writer's block is thinking that it must be about having no ideas. In truth, it’s nearly always about having too many. I’m not struck down with a
The Hagstone
a new short story
Can You Please Stop Telling Me To Live My Best Life Please
Thoughts On The Advice Pandemic
The Reason Your Shampoo Wants You to Use More Shampoo is Because That Means You Will Buy More of Your Shampoo
An extract from my upcoming third novel, Everything Will Swallow You
FINALLY!
At last the painful wait is over, and I can reveal Joe McLaren's brilliant cover design for my third novel. Everything Will Swallow You will be published on September 11th. Or, to put it another way, in just over two months. At one point, not long ago, I
France
Much has happened to me over this past week, but perhaps the place to begin is that last Thursday afternoon I saved a French kitten’s life by grabbing it from between the jaws of a ravenous dog. That’s the part of the trip I just took to France
The Lost Place
In 2022, in the aftermath of the publication of my debut novel Villager, in a wild and impractical dust storm of inspiration, I had an idea for a podcast: a work of fiction, with only the most marginal grounding in reality. It would, I decided, take place in a psychedelic
Newsletter
Why I Decided To Sell (A Really Huge Chunk Of) My Record Collection
I took a formidable wedge of my record collection to a vinyl dealer friend in Gloucestershire this week. It was a chaotic week containing many unexpected tasks so I didn’t get around to counting exactly how many records there were. 600? 700? Something like that. What I do know
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I'm Sorry, I Cannot Afford To Purchase Your House, But I Might Well Write Weird Stories Inspired By It
What a week. Today I found out, via this article in the Bookseller magazine and messages from other authors who wrote books for my ex-publisher, Unbound, that, despite their promises otherwise, a trickle of the huge sum of money they have failed to pay me and others for sales of
Newsletter
Deciding Not To Interview Lou Reed
A mixtape of sorts
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Alien Lanes
Facing - and trying to get over - more than half a lifetime of aerophobia
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April
A unexpectedly special walk, the evolution of a stonking riff, a book recommendation, and four free signed ones I can send you
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Things About The Countryside That Make Me Angry, And Some Photographs I Have Taken Of Them
Autumn is possibly the time of year that makes me most furious when I’m in the countryside. It’s coming again soon, worse luck, and as always it will be disgusting and messy. Look at the state of this path I found a few autumns ago in Gloucestershire, a
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The Man With A Bull In His Living Room
It was the week before I moved house and I was haring around, begging local businesses for old cardboard boxes and dropping off unwanted possessions at charity shops and recycling centres. After donating some books and clothes to the Liskeard branch of British Heart Foundation I realised I was not
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The Gun's Always Loaded, The Horse Always Kicks
Two Days With My Dad
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Geoff Smeeth, His Kiln Dried Logs And His Pet Llama Will Cleanse Your Fractured Doomscrolling Mind
As I drive, as well as trying to stay aware of potential hazards, I scan around for the names of small businesses and their owners on vans and roadside signs. It’s always an insight into the brain-frying number of jobs that are genuinely out there: jobs that, if you
Newsletter
The True Stories Behind The Photographs In The Habitat Catalogues Of The 1970s
This is a piece I wrote a while ago but I wanted to make it free to read again because most of you won’t have seen it, and a couple of people recently told me - to my surprise - that it was their favourite thing I’d written
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The Backlash (and other new fiction)
Some new very short stories by me: one for everyone to read, and four more as a treat for paying subscribers
Podcast
Why I Have Several Thousand Of My Books In My House
And how you can get hold of one (or more)