Interview with Tafad Tan

An interview I did today with three Cardiff creatives (Jason Philips - musician and producer, Alrick "Ninjah" Wilson - musician and occasional drag queen, and Max Lewy - poet), on such topics as Beijing, burlesque, decluttering, writing, being transgender, and boasting a little about famous relatives. YOUTUBE LINK

Steamboat Ellie

It took a little time (bearing in mind I wrote the thing back in 2015), but with huge thanks to the wonderful Megan Pritchard (AKA fellow burlesque dancer Flossie Smalls) for her awesome cover design, my steampunk fantasy novel is at last good to go... ************ The vengeful, disfigured Gloriana - rebel fay queen and...

“A strength badly exerted” – Rousseau, Radicalism, and Repression in the Works of P. B. Shelley

Something a little unusual for this blog - This is an academic article I wrote back in late 2013, revised in 2015, then forgot about after the e-journal it was intended for vanished off the face of the interwebs never to resurface. Since I absolutely cannot be bothered with the rigmarole of trying to find...

Pretty Gems and Paranoid Androids

My writing has really taken a back seat to my burlesque for over a year now, since my last Gothic dabbling in the world of fanfic. However, being a big fan of "Steven Universe", I've been toying with the idea of doing some sort of crossover fiction with the Crystal Gems for some time now,...

Annual Nerdfest Time …

It's that time of year again: the C64 Shoot-'Em-Up-Construction-Kit (SEUCK) game-designing contest, hosted by Richard Bayliss of The New Dimension, is upon us again and now very near to being in its tenth year, in which duration yours truly has won it a grand total of once. Since that taste of victory was last year,...

Extended Halloween …

How curious. Halloween has never figured too heavily on my calender until this year, which - between various horror-themed burlesque shows and alt-80s nights - may have been the Gothiest year of my life, and the extended Halloween is not quite over yet ... Yes, I am still a writer, even if I have rather...

Book Review – “Ghostkin” (Ellen Mellor, 2018)

"Ghostkin" works from a premise that will be instantly familiar to fans of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer": an inextricable collision between the otherworld and the mundane world has forced history (since the 20th century) down an alternative route in which humans have been forced to coexist with fay, demons, spirits, and various undead horrors. However,...

“Destiny of the Daleks” – reappraisal

(The Doctor, Romana, random Movellan soldier, and various humans catching the bus together. How deceptively innocent ...) I have already written on this story (Destiny of the Daleks - retrospective) but felt it deserved a revisit ... sadly because I was way too generous to it. While one would often prefer to be generous when...