I’m doing the #facility23 challenge every week day, and every month we’re on a different asteroid in The Temenos Ark, a vast, cobbled together spaceship that fled the solar system when an alien piece of music swept through intent on taking over every sentient being. What happened next is the core of After the War, …
I’m now in Week 7 of #Facility23 and it’s become part of my daily creative process. The idea is to write a single room or location in a TTRPG environment every weekday and it’s going great! It’s teaching me a lot about process too and how to do very nearly everything I do better. Here …
Who’s hungry? Oh it has been a WHILE since we did one of these! So, it gives me tremendous pleasure to welcome you back to Al Dente, our (very) occasional cooking spot. This yeasty lad is a bagel loaf, based on Joshua Weissman‘s recipe in An Unapologetic Cookbook. I’ve made this a few times but …
Every decade the British Film Institute publish a curated list of the Greatest Movies of All Time. It is, of course, wrong because everyone has a different list and everyone’s list is right but it’s a lovely exercise. There’s a quote from Guillermo del Toro about these lists and what they do, which speaks viscerally …
The Secret of St Kilda is one of my favourite horror podcasts and one of my favourite jobs! I play the Narrator and it’s always a pleasure to spend some time with the incredibly talented Kilda folks. Earlier this week, two-fisted editor and all-around badass Mick got in contact and asked me to record some …
Something a little different today. My original plan was to use an extra Story Engine draw for #horror23 and these are the cards I got. I took these and wrapped them around the Corn Exchange in Leeds, which is an irrationally beautiful building I worked in for a while. A friend once described it as …
I got to do something really fun earlier today; a double notebook swap! At the start of the week too! It’s always a nice feeling, setting up the books for the next six weeks or so and I thought I’d walk you through it. On the left! My Travellers Notebook. Marguerite and I got our …
This essay was originally published in the 16th December 2023 issue of The Full Lid Months ago, I wrote two lines that would start and end an essay. The first was this: Help isn’t coming. The original piece was born of the frustration Jenga required of working in a creative field in 2022. Pushing against …
I’ve been having great fun with Facility23 as a daily writing challenge and as we start to head to the end of the first month, now’s a good time to give you an idea of the setting. I’m writing it for After the War, the game my buddy Jason Pitre and co-created because it’s a …
We’re at the top of week three of Facility23 and it’s going really well. Working with The Story Engine cards is massive fun and the setting is coming together really well. It’s so much fun in fact, I did one draw too many last week. Instead of ignoring it, I decided to do something different. …