Graham Storrs

Not being a religious person, I don’t have a handy reference book to guide me on moral matters. So I tend to put in quite a lot of brain-time working on questions of right and wrong. One of these questions popped into my head a couple of years ago – about the time when I [...]

I hope my favourite sci-fi newsletter, Ansible, won’t mind if I reproduce the following paragraph verbatim. Not only is this matter one that outrages me, but Ansible’s treatment of it is just brilliant. Anyway, enjoy: Peter Watts, Canadian sf author beaten up and pepper-sprayed by a US border guard in December (see A270), was convicted [...]

Fresh from my first ever web radio interview, I am now a world expert. (You can see just how expert I am at this by downloading the MP3 recording of the show I did yesterday with the lovely Nanci Arvizu, who does the Page Readers show on BlogTalkRadio.) And, on the basis of this extensive [...]

I’m developing a relationship with Amazon. It used to be a simple relationship. I bought books from them. Well, not quite simple. I occasionally bought books when their low price plus the exorbitant cost of shipping to Australia worked out better than a local bookshop, or it was a book you just couldn’t get here. [...]

Vlentine’s Day is always overshadowed at our place by my wife’s birthday, which falls on the 13th. (She was actually born on Friday 13th – which is how she ended up with me, I suppose.) If I haven’t demonstrated sufficient love and caring by the end of the 13th, there’s no hope of recovering my [...]

A survey of book promotion tactics was conducted by The Savvy Book Marketer in December, 2009, and is reported today. It asked a number of authors what their book promotion strategy would involve in 2010. You can check the method and the outcome there. I just want to look at the list of tactics they [...]

I now have the galleys of my novel TimeSplash and they have prompted me to say this to all aspiring novellists. When you write a novel, make sure it is as rich, deep and subtle as you can possibly make it. Make all the characters complex and interesting, in fact, make them fascinating. Make sure [...]

Writers are pretty nice people on the whole. The amazing response from writers in support of Haiti has been very gratifying to see. Australian SF writer Marianne de Pierres today recommended Medecins Sand Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) as an effective group to support if you want to help people over there. John Scalzi also recommends [...]

My perception of the Web has changed. I used to think it was full of people like me, ordinary folk, going about their business, finding things that interested them, chatting to friends and acquaintances, but I was wrong. Oh, there may be such people – millions of them – but they don’t really matter. What [...]

One of the first things that struck me when I became involved with writers’ groups, was that most aspiring writers can’t write. They may be full of wild imaginings, they may have stories in them, yearning to be told, but, as well as lacking the more esoteric skills of the craft, they can’t form a [...]