One of the most miserable things about living in this era is having to watch the stupidest & most arrogant people in the world have to relearn The Why of literally everything good that we collectively do the hard way. The answer is always ‘Because a bunch of people died, fuckwit.’

Great time this weekend at Bloody barnes, a new crime festival. A wonderful atmosphere, engaged audience, and of course the adorable Magic 😍🐶 The organisers did a great job of looking after us. I didn’t take the Pen and Cob, but it was an honour to be shortlisted. Congratulations to the organisers!

Chatting about music with @tommeadauthor.bsky.social and came across the title of @dvbishop.com's next book

I may delete this because it’s a bit spicy but it shouldn’t be lost on us that games being turned into TV is essentially harvesting the stories written by those who don’t have union representation or healthcare with WGA by those that do. Our stories are good enough for TV but the writers aren’t?

Braving the weather on a trip to London for the Cob & Pen Awards dinner (The Dog Sitter Detective Plays Dead is on the shortlist 🐶🔍) followed by Bloody Barnes , where I’m on a Saturday panel with Martin Edwards and Victoria Dowd. See you there!

"By the end of the two-year period, 94% of participants reported they were housed." A million pilot programs show the same thing: when people are given enough money to afford housing, homelessness ends. Other supports matter, but housing comes first. Not policing. Not moralizing. Homes.

Thrilled to see "Consensual Hallucination" (from my SILENCAEON album Dead Channel) opening this week's Syrup Moose Radio broadcast! Airing today on 93.9 CICK, and you can also stream it here: www.smithersradio.com/program-play...

I just pledged to help this fantastic project of Emma's. I was there when her song won the Stiles + Drew Prize, and can't wait to see this show fulfil its potential!

"[Since the '80s], private equity has gobbled up £1.2 trillion in assets across Britain, a greater proportion than any other advanced economy... everything from schools, daycare centres, dentists and care homes to water companies, vets and even bucolic little villages in the Cotswolds".

RE that RT.. it’s wild how steam reviews are still so damn important to getting visibility. If you play and like indie games, the most generous and helpful thing you can do is spend an hour popping positive reviews onto anything you like with <500 or so reviews.

"Not only don't people work less when they are guaranteed an income, they might actually put in more effort at work. And the fact that they have more money to spend leads to the creation of more jobs." Nobel Prize–winning economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

"A proper mystery with interesting and varied characters, and Ace the border collie is absolutely fabulous! Another entertaining read in one of my favourite new series" Great review of The Dog Sitter Detective Takes the Lead from The Puzzle Doctor:

85% of AI music tracks are “played by bots rather than humans in order to siphon off royalties” - replacing listeners as well as creators…

Now it's only a matter of feeding those AI-generated papers to an AI reviewer which will send back comments to the AI paper generator to close the loop and generate a whole AI-generated alternate science.

I literally get 10-20 LLM-generated scam emails every day, now. It's absolutely out of control, but thankfully they're (so far!) still so obviously fake that it's easy to spot and delete them quickly.

Latest anti-writer scam is a fake Goodreads Reading Challenge, using a gmail rather than a goodreads domain email. At this point any genuine contact is going to get lost in the torrent of spam. AI semi-targeted mass messaging is the parasite that kills the host.

Lovely lunch in Ilkley today with (about half of) the Pennine Poisoners crime writers group. It's a solitary profession, so there's nothing like getting together with friends for a good chinwag 😉 Excuse my off-kilter selfie (lack of) skills

My talk from December’s AdventureX conference, “Just One More Chapter: How to Write a Great Story” is now up on YouTube! Finally, you can see the context from that slide that went a bit viral and made people angry 😅 www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzY0...

Accurate 😂

My talk from December’s AdventureX conference, “Just One More Chapter: How to Write a Great Story” is now up on YouTube! Finally, you can see the context from that slide that went a bit viral and made people angry 😅 www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzY0...

The AI spam reaches a new level of absurdity, attempting to persuade me to invite myself to feature my own book

Simple explanation: Bookworms *grow into* bookdragons

Tickets are now on sale for a brand new Can You Solve the Murder? Live show at York Literature Festival on March 16! Test your wits in a fun murder-mystery game, followed by a short talk about how I wrote the book: www.yorktheatreroyal.co.uk/show/can-you...

YES THAT'S WHAT MANY OF US HAVE BEEN SAYING FOR YEARS AND THATS WHY WE DON'T USE IT AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Call me old-fashioned, but I think it’s incredibly crass to demand certain (controversial) story beats from your writing team, fire that writing team, then throw that writing team under the bus for decisions *they didn’t make* while marketing your new thing. Very crass! Very ick!

Look, I'm going to tell you a secret. If you buy an e-book while it's on sale, you never have to read it. If you have $2 to spare & want to help that particular author, you can just chuck the book into the oubliette of your TBR. Every sale helps. The author will never know, but you gave them a gift.

Jason @snell.zone at Six Colors very kindly asked me to explain how I plan and write an interactive novel like Can You Solve the Murder?. It's not easy! 😅 But helped by using good digital tools, as I explain: sixcolors.com/post/2026/01...

Eddie wrote the wonderful Welcome To Our Village, Please Invade Carefully, one of my favourite radio sitcoms. This looks just as fun – do consider backing it 👇

Received my PLR statement today, for UK library loans 2024-25. Just over 27,000 total, the most since 2015. The majority is always the Alex Rider graphic novels, 20,000 this year, but 7,000 loans of my books (DSD, CYSTM, etc) is almost double the previous year. Nice 📚

Lovely news! Congratulations @antonyjohnston.bsky.social whose cracking novel THE DOG SITTER DETECTIVE PLAYS DEAD has been shortlisted for the inaugural Pen and Cob Award - with the winner announced at the Bloody Barnes Crime Writing Festival in Feb. @allisonandbusby.bsky.social

Did someone say 2016? Yeah, that was… quite a year

I've just been informed that The Dog Sitter Detective Plays Dead has been shortlisted for the inaugural Cob and Pen Award, organised by the new Bloody Barnes festival (at which I'm also a guest this Feb). Congrats to my fellow shortlistees! 🎉 @allisonandbusby.bsky.social @sarahsuch.bsky.social

In April 2024, Spotify implemented a new scheme: songs with less than 1k streams per year would no longer receive royalties. The data for 2025 was just released via Luminate, and 88% of songs have been demonetized. Read it again: 88% of songs on Spotify have been demonetized.

wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage

IT'S FINALLY HERE!!!! So excited to share this show with you all. I am so grateful for the support and encouragement from so many people to get this off the ground 🚀 If you need a spot of light-heartedness in your day, this is the show for you! ✨ Please have a listen and please share!

For those who may not want to use Bandcamp, you can now buy a selection of the most popular SILENCAEON albums on @ampwall.com, a new music site created to be artist-friendly: ampwall.com/a/silencaeon

The artwork of #ShadowOfTheBeast by Roger Dean used on the cover of the #FMTowns, #PCEngineCD, #SegaGenesis, #MegaDrive, #AtariST, #AtariLynx, #AmstradCPC, #Commodore64, #CommodoreAmiga, and #ZXSpectrum releases across the globe. Usual upscale/clean/retouch process applied.

From John Berger's "Ways of Seeing". Rather depressing, not to mention distressing, how relevant this passage remains more than 50 years later. ("Publicity" here is shorthand for the advertising and marketing canon of western consumerist capitalism)

🚨FLASH : on a retrouvé une manette de l'âge de pierre, indiquant que nos ancêtres jouaient déjà aux jeux vidéos.

Finished reading this year's @shorescripts.bsky.social competition finalists. Every year I'm amazed at the inventiveness and talent on display from these up-and-coming writers; it's a privilege to read their work. There can only be one winner (announced soon), but congratulations to all 👏

OXFORD-BASED ASPIRING ARTISTS, get yourself down to Blackwell’s on Jan 17 to learn a thing or two from my good friend, ATOMIC BLONDE artist Sam Hart: downthetubes.net/sam-harts-ne...

Hey, I know a lot of you use Discord. You need to get on this survey and make it damn clear to them that this would be the absolute wrong direction. The last thing we need is the slop-spewing environment-chewing plagiarism bots invading there, too. discord.sjc1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...?

It was recently announced in The Bookseller, but anyway here's the lineup so far for Coastal Crime in September! I'll be chatting whodunits with luminaries @antonyjohnston.bsky.social and @alexpavesi.bsky.social! coastalcrime.org/main-hall-pr...

Freezing day at the canal

1950-something

Cold night is curry night, with a little help from The Twisted Curry Co's "Christmas Curry" mix 🎄 (I know it's January, shhh)

Apart from the actual computers, the most advanced thing in my house is a decade-old TV that’s barely smarter than a rock. No “smart” appliances, switches, or plugs. This is why. world.hey.com/jason/the-bi...

Looking forward to appearing at Coastal Crime in September! Initial line-up just announced in The Bookseller: www.thebookseller.com/news/new-coa...

I am thoroughly amused by how many of the people in this "anonymous" #gothsuptrees photo from a 1990s UK net.goth picnic I recognise… 🤘🦇🖥 gothsuptrees.net/post/8046758...

Frozen canal / Lots o' wires