Mars, the god of war, presides over a tumultuous year. Mars the planet had its closest approach to Earth on October 6th, coming into opposition on the 18th. Although fading at the time of writing, it remains a welcome sight in the evening sky. At its closest, Mars was only 38.57 million miles (62.07 million km) from Earth.

On the clearest autumn nights it almost seemed almost possible to reach out and touch the fiery red eye of light. The telescope revealed a hypnotic, blurry pinkish, marked disk. It’s quite something to think of the probes and rovers we’ve already sent there. The thought of human footprints on the planet is something else again.

A human colony on Mars is today the prime ambition of Elon Musk, who discussed his plans at the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico in September 2016. Musk wants to build…

This is the beginning of a series of weekly how-to posts by Colin Brush. Follow this blog to get all the instalments.

‘If you think you have a book evolving, now is the time to write the flap copy – the blurb, in fact. An author should never be too proud to write their own flap copy. Getting the heart and soul of a book into fewer than 100 words helps you focus. More than half the skill of writing lies in tricking the book out of your own head.’  Terry Pratchett, Guardian

You’ve spent months, even years, writing and editing your book. The intricacies of story, characters, plot and theme interlock like the pieces of a jigsaw. You’ve polished and polished until the words shine. You’ve got the perfect title. The cover is coming along a treat. You’ve even garnered some advance praise. Everything is looking good for publication…

Eugen Bacon is an award-winning writer of speculative fiction and non-fiction. Her works include Claiming T-Mo (Meerkat Press 2019), Writing Speculative Fiction: Critical and Creative Approaches (Macmillan 2020), Inside the Dreaming (NewCon Press, 2020) and Hadithi and The State of Black Speculative Fiction, a forthcoming collaboration with Milton Davies (Luna Press, 2020). In this essay, she reflects on some of her favourite black speculative fiction.

 As an African Australian who’s grappled with matters of identity, writing black speculative fiction is like coming out of the closet. It’s a recognition that I’m Australian and African, and it’s okay—the two are not mutually exclusive. I am many, betwixt, a sum of cultures. I am the self and ‘other’, a story of inhabitation, a multiple embodiment and my multiplicities render themselves in cross-genre writing. As a reader, writer and an editor, I’m increasingly noticing black speculative fiction, and it’s on the rise.

Milford: First of all, Liz, could you please give us a very quick introduction to Comet Weather.

Liz: It’s the only novel I’ve ever written which is set in contemporary Britain. It’s set partly in Somerset, where I live, and in London and Wiltshire. The plan, however, is to write 4 novels, all of which are set in the Southern counties of England. Although I come from a Welsh and Scots background, I feel that a lot of Celtic mythology has been mined to death and there is so much folklore and myth in Southern England – in the West Country, and counties such as Hampshire and Dorset, that it would be interesting to explore it.

Milford: In the last two decades you’ve had fourteen or so novels published, as well as a couple of novellas, short stories and short story collections encompassing both science fiction and fantasy, but this…

Originally posted on Ben Jeapes’ blog

Go to the book’s home page

Slowly but surely His Majesty’s Starship approached completion … and approached it … and approached it. For a very long time indeed I was almost there, with just a couple of thousand words to go, and I simply wasn’t writing them. I self-diagnosed the problem, which was that I had a life and I was unwilling to lose it. The solution was to start getting up earlier, writing before going to work. It’s a habit I’ve kept.

Placing it with a publisher was quite atypically easy. Two friends from my writers group already shared an agent, Robert Kirby. Robert had been sufficiently tickled by their descriptions of the group to ask if he could have first refusal if any of the rest of us ever wrote a novel. I sent His Majesty’s Starship to him in August 1995…

I remember a conversation in my first writing group from many years ago about whether or not writing could be taught. Some people thought no, that writing alone in all the fields of human endeavour, was somehow special and the ability was innate, Gods-given. The best you could do was encourage, but teaching, darling, was simply not possible.

As a journeyman writer still wet behind the ears I soaked this up. Was it true? I had my doubts. Later I realised this was nonsense. Everything other human activity is taught, from acting to zoology, writing is not that special, not that precious. The conversation moved on to whether writing was art or craft. Over time this has interested me probably far more than it reasonably should.

In paraphrase, the great French poet Paul Valéry wrote that a work of art is never finished, merely abandoned. You can read the full…

As a writer, it can be frustrating to learn that the story in your head is not the same as the story your audience is reading on the page.

Whether it’s a plot point, some description, a character motivation, or even the emotional resonance of a particular scene, there can be something that seems completely clear to you, but falls flat when you share it with your audience.

It’s that dreaded moment when someone tells you that they just didn’t ‘get’ it.

While it’s tempting to ignore that kind of criticism (“You don’t understand my genius!” etc.), it’s worth considering whether you have a problem with the gap. The ‘gap’ of course being whatever was lost in translation between your brain, the page and the reader’s imagination.

This was one of the most important lessons that I took away from Milford. I submitted a short story with a twist ending…

Good day, and welcome to a special edition of The Milford Report, covering the release of 15 authors on to a rural environment in north Wales with nothing but their wits, several bottles of booze and all the pesto they could manage at their disposal.

Our season started with the arrival of each of the writers from across the globe, whom for (not necessarily) legal reasons we shall name each of now. There was Jacey, Tiffani, Powder, Sam, Mark, Victor, Tania, Sue, Kari, Steph, Tina, Terry, Pauline, Liz and myself.

The crack team of scribblers landed in a thoroughly suspecting Trigonos which, of course, being ready for us pacified us with copious quantities of food and cake for the entire duration of our stay. Inevitable desk rearrangements aside, most of us met up on the Saturday evening to make introductions, enjoy our first meal and prepare ourselves for an intense…