Mark Charan Newton

Okay, so this is totally a geek thing, but how cool is it? (Linked to from Bookninja.)
For those of you who don’t know, ISBNs are the International Standard Book Numbers you get near the barcode. Every title has a unique ISBN. And to see them as graffiti is simply awesome enough to make me want [...]

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A good convention, Alt Fiction, based in the Assembly Rooms in Derby. Cheers to Alex for such dedication to organise it.
Far too many folks there for me to catch up with in the four hours we hung around. But I like this con. It’s all about the fiction. All about the writing, the craft of [...]

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It’s always interesting, when I see writer blogs, to say publicly who your influences are, I find. Plus it’s a shortcut to the ‘Oh, dude, so, like, whose books are cool?’ answer.
Main ones:
Don DeLillo
M John Harrison
China Miéville
Conrad Williams
Ernest Hemingway
Lesser, but still significant:
Steven Erikson
Jonathan Lethem
Christopher Priest
David Peace
Henning Mankell
Lawrence Durrell
J.G. Ballard
A mixed bag of genres, but I [...]

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One of my favourite writers, Don DeLillo, makes the front cover of The Onion.
Awesome. I love that magazine. DeLillo is by far the best prose stylist I’ve ever come across. Underworld is perhaps the greatest novel. Sometimes, when some of his paragraphs are flying with cool structure and word selection, there is nothing better. Nothing. [...]

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A packed but fun weekend. On Saturday, I met up with James Long, who runs a tidy little review blog at Speculative Horizons. We managed to chat non-stop about books and life for a solid six hours. A thoroughly nice chap, who I hope to catch up with again at Alt Fiction later this month.
Sunday [...]

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First one I’ve seen, over at Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review, and also the first review of anything of mine. And it’s a good one!
…a book that people will get a lot out of, especially if they’re fans of China Mieville’s work. Whether you’re after soaking up the sights of a fantastically drawn world, or being [...]

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This is a fantastic line that I’ve read (re-read) recently in M. John Harrison’s wonderful, genre re-defining novel, Light. It’s when the character Ed Chianese is in one of the tank farms, imagining himself in a virtual world detective film from the 20th Century, the plot being in the far future. He raises his Colt:
He [...]

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A little angst. I finished Nights of Villjamur thinking that no publisher would take it. I wrote this book I hoped would go into new territory, some genre-bending fantasy, whilst keeping readers in touch with more trad markets. When the pen had been put down, I was thinking about dozens of new ideas, radically different [...]

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So, yesterday I took the train down to the Big Smoke to see my agent and visit the offices of Macmillan. It was one of those really, really cool moments. I met up with John for a coffee before hand, and had the usual chat about the world with him. Then, we meandered to the [...]

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This section should really start off with the sub-heading: “Dodgy Agents”.
Well, firstly, I want to state that you should never part with any cash. There are some scumbags people in this industry that want to prey on aspiring writers. They say, “Yeah, I’ll represent you. Oh, there’s just this processing fee” and away they go, [...]

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