Really pleased to be long listed again this year. I don't usually write fiction and the Dorothy Dunnet competition is a great opportunity to do it!

Grimma Wormtongue is a Lord of the Rings character that sounds like a Harry Potter character.

My article for @nytimes.com is in French! It's the first time anything I've written has been translated. www.ledevoir.com/societe/scie... That feels like a writer achievement unlocked. #writing #writesky

Check out my piece in the @nytimes.com about the 1980s cola space race. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/29/s... Worked with some great editors and a spoke with interesting people while I was working on this. Really pleased to see this published. #space #nasa #spaceshuttle #challenger

www.sussexexpress.co.uk/news/people/... Come see where the Hawkhurst Gang went on trial if you're in #chichester on a Thursday morning! #smuggling #c18th

As a writer, you're going to do things that are a waste of time. Do them anyway. Send that pitch, write that piece outside your niche, research that crazy obscure subject. It will probably come to nothing, but you'll learn something and it might be amazing. #writingcommunity

It's a real honor that Lou Ferrante endorsed my book! When a former mobster and bestselling author likes your book, it really means something! amzn.eu/d/h1tPRU1 #booksky #histbookchat 🗃️ #kent #sussex #smuggling.

Still time to get the book delivered for Christmas!

I get it, you don't know what to buy your dad/uncle/grandpa for Christmas. Get him my book if he likes crime!* *Reading about crime, not doing crime. Actually, get it for him if he likes doing crime too. www.amazon.co.uk/Hawkhurst-Co... 🗃️ #histbookchat #smuggling #kent #sussex

My book is in an archive. The historian circle of life is complete. Really great to see it stocked so close to where it takes place! #booksky #histbookchat #authorsky

My stupid fan theory: #tropico is the Anno game that can't be made because none of the years in the 20th century add up to 9.

I was in the UK ten years before I realized the Pudsey had nothing to do with Remembrance Day. Like I thought he was some sort of friendly cartoon war wounded.

Anyone in the #writingcommunity know of a good lit mag that takes historical fiction submissions? I've got a story: 3500 words, takes place in 1910s, book-club fiction. Long-listed for the Dorothy Dunnet award. Not necessarily looking to get paid, just to get a clip. #historicalfiction #writing

Starting a #tropico game and playing a leader where I try to make people's lives better, even though I don't have to, feels like an act of rebellion right now.

I did a straw poll on my other account on where people found their last history book. The takeaway for me is: A book finds you, you don't find a book. Marketing is important for authors. Who knew? #booksky #authorsky

Lukewarm take on the War on Drugs is also a bad take on the Hawkhurst Gang... www.guardian-series.co.uk/news/2462744...

Two satellite images of Eastern Ukraine: August, 2022 and August 2024 The brown streak in the second picture is the front. The war's destruction is visible from space. #ukraine 🇺🇦 from the NOAA JSTAR mapper. www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/mapper/

My short story, Purity, got long-listed in the HWA Dorothy Dunnet Short Story Competition Really honored to be there with some great #histfic writers! #HWADDSS24 www.historiamag.com/hwa-dd-ss-20...

Bluesky now has over 10 million users, and I was #409,951!

Jenkins' Quality Barbecue, Jacksonville, FL 1979 I kinda want to eat there just for the cool building. LOC flic.kr/p/2225vgm

Bracelet Bay, Wales. We got there at low tide which revealed an array of miniature landscapes among the rocks. 📸 More in 🧵

IYKYK...

The backup dancers at the closing ceremony have strong Power Rangers putty vibes. #olympics #paris2024

I'm thinking about applying to be a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Are there any current fellows out there willing to sponsor an independent scholar who's recently published a book (i.e. me)? 🗃️ #c18th

"All those public service cuts will be lost in time, like tears in the rain..."

These aren't the snacks I would choose while reading my book, but if my readers enjoy them, I'm not going to judge...

I've been reading a bunch of short stories researching a project and I know that I'm almost 30 years late for this but... The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is an amazing collection!

I'm writing an article about the 80s and I lost a whole evening trying to solve my daughter's rubik's cube. It's not procrastination, its method #writing!

I love it when a news article references EP Thompson and food riots. Great article in The Economist on #inflation www.economist.com/finance-and-...

I *really* wish that people would stop claiming to have statistically derived universal human experience... www.bbc.com/future/artic...

Question for the intellectual historians out there: Do we see anything similar to the idea of authenticity (similar to that expressed by Sartre and Adorno, and practiced by music cultures like punk and hip hop) pre 20th century? 🗃️

The account of the smuggler's murders in the 1740s has been print for centuries. Joanna Davies is selling the latest reprint in her ebay shop! www.ebay.co.uk/itm/12560600...

Sell your truck, get gas money! This is a spam message I got on LinkedIn today. Don't think you can pay me enough to do this...

Somehow, this guy's parents knew he was an elite cyclist...

Great Blog post from the National Archives about a little island that appeared and disappeared in the 14th century. Really interesting to see how the British coastline is constantly changing. 🗃️ beta.nationalarchives.gov.uk/explore-the-...

Any historians out there have any advice for conducting a phone interview with a source? I'm talking to a person about something that happened in the mid 1980s. 🗃️

Me at the start of a #Stellaris game vs. Me at the end of a Stellaris game.

Most of your ideas are bad. So have lots of them, and try to pick the good ones.

Man... the Reagan Library has a hell of a 404 page... 😬

A very good example of why digital archives are great, but you still need to keep the originals. From the Reagan Presidential Library's papers of Michael Deaver. #archives #digitization

Great review of my book, Hawkhurst by Captain James Bollinger. Check it out. Captain James is running a pretty cool local history YouTube channel! #kent #sussex #localhistory youtu.be/3c3EdSjrtNc?...

replicant? "You're in a desert, you see a walled city in front of you. You keep circling the city and blowing the shofar but the walls aren't tumbling down. Why is that?"

The Death of the Author applies to your pitches. You're not pitching the idea in your head, you're pitching what you wrote in your pitch. What I'm trying to say is that writing pitches is hard... #writing #pitches

Me watching the bowls championship on TV:

Question for the software developers out there: What's your favorite engineering based comedy? Looking for stuff like Programmers Are Also Human. The crunchy stuff that people in the industry share amongst themselves. #developers #software #comedy

For scholarly purposes, I'm including January 2024 in the "Long 2023". I'm absolving myself of any resolutions or diets for a little while longer. 🗃️

Turning a big dial on it that says "Radetzky March" and looking at the audience for approval like it's the Price is Right.

I'm a believer that digital archives are: 1. Important for increasing access to historical records 2. Part of government's duty to preserve and make records available to citizens. Pennsylvania should not be giving ownership of digital records to ancestry.com www.dailyitem.com/news/inside-...

I did not expect to find this when I was researching early 20th-century detective agencies. What the hell WOTC? www.dicebreaker.com/categories/t....

I'm a huge proponent of digitizing histori Al records to create wider access, but it is also super important to keep the originals as well.