Conrunner, Writer, Pengineer, Equaliser Millionwordman

Review of The Night Ship   A story should go somewhere, that’s the central tenet for anything that’s been put on paper, if you haven’t got to a different place, found different people, different perspectives, what was the point of the story in the first place.   The Night Ship is a story where things change and do not change, told in the claustrophobia of a vehicle as it journeys onwards to destinations unclear. There’s the danger outside the vehicle, the danger of what they

So what’s with all the reviews? Last year was a grinder, no two ways about it, for me and many people that I know, it was just relentless misery, like a slavering beast, unbound and hungry to consume others. I finished the year on cheerful results from a colonoscopy (Little C, not Big C) and vowed that the new year would not hit me as hard as the previous one had. If you want to make god laugh… But actually, on this, I found myself thinking, not this year, not this time, not

Content Warning: Mention of Personal Regrets (Even though I shouldn't) Some books are entertaining, some books are informative, on very rare occasions, some books are both.   This book, is both.   Ignorance is not purely negative, this was the line upon which I decided to read the book, and I was not disappointed in what I found within.  Split into four different types of ignorance, each one very different, but thereby pointing out eloquently that there are reasons whereby ig

It begins, as these things often do, with a heist to retrieve a relic from a place that no one knew about, returning it, not for the greater good or because it should be in a museum, but for the fat reward.  Only it turns out that the relic is an instrument of mass destruction and the recovery team barely get away before everything goes boom.   That alone would have been enough to get the attention, but the story quickly matures into the possibility of Armageddon writ large a

There are artists that are good, and there are artists that are great.   Lewis Larosa is Great, no question about it, his artwork has redefined the nature of comics and visual storytelling for many years, and I was more than interested to find out more about how he came up with the distinctive styles that he’s known for.   The book is split into several different comics, each one with notes on where the ideas and art direction came from and how it influenced the end result. 

And so, the intrepid author decided to go from Pennsylvania to South Africa, because of Hans Zimmer…   Don’t believe it?   By the end of the book, you just might.   This isn’t a coherent tale of one mans journey from Inspiration to salvation, topped off by the inevitable revelation that we are all the same under the skin.  This is a madcap romp through south Africa, back to America, back to South Africa, rinse (with unclean water) and repeat.   The style of storytelling is en

“One advantage of having your mind uploaded into an ecosystem should have been that you didn’t end up in stupid meetings…”   An impossibility and a down to earth observation, delivered in the same sentence.   If you haven’t read Adrian Tchaikovsky before, this is what you should expect, the impossible married to the ordinary, presented in a way that doesn’t require you to read a dictionary to comprehend it.   There’s a useful primer at the beginning of the book that explains

Book One   Those two words carry a heavy weight upon them, the promise that the story does not end here, that what you have in your hands will not be the end of what you start reading here, and that what you read here will be enough that you will want to read on, when the next piece arrives.   In many cases, Book One drives the inevitable fear of not wanting to read it, in case book two isn’t as good, or worse, doesn’t arrive.   Do not make that mistake here.   The Book of Fa

Yes Officer, that is the man wot stole it... The feeling you get when something is stolen from you is a strange one to be sure, that...

Most people who know me, know that I like fountain pens, and I like letting other people try them out and get ideas about how to write,...

Yesterday, Jude and I were down at the Birmingham Hiton Metropole, but this time not to run a convention.   This time was something else...

Don’t get to the cinema as often as I used to, in some respects that’s because I don’t have the time I used to have, and in recent...

Once upon a time, there was a world where art was a sacred expression of the human experience. People would spend hours, days, and...

Last year, we were looking at the possibility of having to move out of the Novotel as we’d outgrown its capacity, and that hasn’t changed....

Image from Lil Artsy In advance, I don’t have a dog in this fight, I do conventions, I make events for people to play games at, I don’t...

Last weekend, I got a rare opportunity, to actually go to a convention that I wasn’t working or helping at in any official capacity. We...

When you’re running RPG’s, you need several things. Players… Rules… Scenario… The first one will come if the second two are there, the...

Photo by Daniel Frank from Pexels Trigger warning for Dentistry going wrong I went to the dentists today, I hate the dentists, but more...

Watching the season finale, and indeed the series finale, of The Expanse earlier today, and as I’m watching, a list of the pilots names...

It’s unlikely anyone has missed the mood of the United Kingdom following yesterdays Prime Ministers Questions, and even less likely that...