Author
It’s been an amazing experience to work with series and managing editors Nathan Leslie and Michelle Elvy and fellow Associate Editors, Barbara Byar, Damian Dressick, Lynn Mundell, Mandira Pattnaik, and Charles Rammelkamp on this year’s Best Small Fictions anthology! Best Small Fictions is the first-ever contemporary anthology solely dedicated to anthologizing the best internationally published short…
I was over the moon that The Cincinnati Review published my micro piece The Meat Ration! Thanks so much to editor Kate Jayroe, and especially to Smokelong Quarterly, where this piece began in the March Micro Marathon ’25, and then somehow won the up to 400-word story competition at the end of the wonderfully fun…
At the beginning of 2024, I launched a literary magazine – Inkfish – with my friend, brilliant writer and editor Peter McAllister. Our third edition will come out on October 31st, embracing the Hallowe’en-y seasonal atmosphere. Our second edition celebrated Cornish writers and artists and was so lovely to assemble that we decided to release…
I’m really excited to see this lovely anthology become available for sale. This is a collection of short suspense stories which evolved from the lovely work of the writers who took my Comma Press Writing Short Crime Fiction Course in Summer 2024. Six perfect victims are pushed to their limits, but are they all as…
I’m so excited to be teaching a new online writing course for Comma Press starting in May. You can book tickets for it here. About the course: This online writing course will give you the skills to write a great crime story. You will practice crafting memorable characters, writing believable dialogue, and bringing the world…
I’m thrilled to have some new writing published in Needle Magazine, alongside some amazing poetry, prose poems and experimental pieces. My flash fiction piece is called ‘The Glass Delusion’ and tells story of the Russian composer, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who was afflicted by a psychological illness known as ‘The Glass Delusion’, which caused him acute…
I’ve been reading and writing a lot of short fiction recently. It helps that I’m teaching an MA course on short stories at the moment, so all the inspiration is right in front of me. I often choose a short story to read over a novel, partly because of the familiar truism that you can…
I had a marvellous time taking part in a panel event at the Edinburgh International Science Festival. There were so many interesting things going on, a great deal to see and hear. I was invited to talk on a panel discussing ‘Early Automata, Artificial Intelligence and Frankenstein’. After giving our individual talks, the panellists enjoyed…
It was an honour and an all-round wonderful experience to be asked to judge the Dead Romantic Interviews writing competition for Edge Hill University’s Romantic Lives Conference. There were a lot of terrific entries and it was difficult to choose a winner. You can read the winning entries here. To kick-start the competition, I wrote…
It was a privilege and great fun to be interviewed by French director Jean-Baptiste Péretié for his upcoming documentary about Frankenstein. Jean-Baptiste, whose other films include La Revanche des Geeks, La Galerie France, and Moi, Candidat, wanted the interview to have a gothic vibe. Luckily, my husband John’s photographic studio was near at hand, replete…