Blog posts

The Lumenkin was going to be a short work of eco-sci-fi exploring first contact between the fairy realm on Earth and an alien intelligence that descends through the northern lights. Like so many works of fiction, though, The Lumenkin developed its own opinion about what was happening and I had no choice but to type what it told me. Scenes I expected to last a few paragraphs became entire chapters. Supporting characters I expected to Read more

Do you enjoy stories that slip between genres? By that, I mean stories where myths are rewritten, landscapes remember who strolled through them, strange beings watch from the edges, and the world is never quite as ordinary as it first appears? I’ve created a free PDF called “Weird Worlds” to offer a visual path to the fictional worlds I write about. So far, they include: alien contact, eco-magic, magical realism, dystopian science fiction, urban fantasy Read more

It is said that all art is a self-portrait, an expression that resonates strongly as I reflect on the month of June 2026. Across the last four weeks, I have released four articles, each offering reflections on one of the short stories in my ‘Visions to Words’ collection. I began the month talking about The Watchers: A Story of First Contact with an increasing suspicion that stories of alien invasion endure because they dramatise a Read more

Some myths are so old, they are retold, translated, illustrated, taught, borrowed, softened, sharpened, and moralised until the original story begins to feel like a natural law. Persephone was abducted. Demeter grieved. Hades took. Zeus compromised. The seasons were born. It is one of the oldest and most enduring patterns in Western mythology: a young goddess disappears into darkness, a mother’s grief starves the earth, and the world is only restored when a woman is Read more

Some stories arrive in our lives already decided. They come to us with their heroes polished, their monsters named, and their moral lessons neatly arranged. We were told to believe that Perseus was brave, his sword was righteous, Medusa was monstrous, and her severed head was proof of his victory. I suspect the story was different. I mean, who gets to decide what a monster is? What happens when the person called ‘dangerous’ is only Read more

Last week, I wrote about The Watchers, a story of alien invasion through alteration of a civilization’s memory to make its people believe that they, the Watchers, have lived among them all along. It is a concept that provokes questions about the reliability of memory and the possibility that it is not fixed, but fluid. This is the question that carried me from writing The Watchers into writing Riverborn. In Riverborn, memory is internal. It Read more