Hello! This is a newsletter for people who like stories. Writing them, reading them or a bit of both.
I write a new story every week and share as much as I can about the process. Every week I publish fiction on the Friday and something hopefully useful on the Monday.
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My previous projects
You might want to know a bit more about what I’ve done. I’ve been writing online, serialised stories for about eight years. First on Wattpad, now here on Substack.
No Adults Allowed is an optimistic, post-apocalypse mixture of Lord of the Flies and Heart of Darkness, about responsibility and parenting and well-meaning but murderous AI. You can get this one as an ebook or paperback from Amazon.
The Mechanical Crown is my epic fantasy adventure, packed full of airships, swords, battles and politics. It’s big and exciting and I’m very proud of it. Currently behind a paywall on Wattpad.
A Day of Faces was my debut and is a YA coming-of-age story about a snake girl and her shape-shifting friend who accidentally wind up changing the world. It’s hard to explain. Also behind the paywall on Wattpad for the moment.
A bit about me
I’m a writer based in Norwich, England.
My debut novel A Day of Faces was serialised in 2015 and 2016, winning a Watty Award in 2016 and hitting over 179,000 reads online. It’s about youth, revolution and shape-shifting animal people. I completed a 3-year, serialised, weekly run on my follow-up book The Mechanical Crown in 2019 and was selected by Wattpad for their Star programme. In 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic I serialised the YA novel No Adults Allowed, a post-apocalyptic alternative to Lord of the Flies which turned out to be more timely than expected. I’m currently publishing weekly chapters of my anthology series, Tales from the Triverse, which is a mash-up of a police procedural, science fiction and fantasy.
You might have heard me on The Writing Life podcast which I produced for several years. I’ve spoken about serialisation at Primadonna Festival and for the National Centre for Writing. I’ve also taught for the BBC, FutureLearn, LinkedIn Learning, Access Creative and the Africa Game Developers Community. These days I work at One Further helping cultural organisations do exciting digital things.
AI declaration: I used MidJourney for much of 2022, but as of February 2023 I no longer use generative AI for images. Everything you see and read here will be created by humans. More details here.
To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.
