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Poptastic pop blog The Pop Cop wants to talk about Rachel Sermanni. This week it emerged that Carrbridge singer-songwriter Rachel Sermanni was fronting a Royal Bank of Scotland advertising campaign on YouTube, which sees her talk about the services she uses as well as play a new tune called Everything Is Ok. As a business, RBS have committed some disreputable deeds in the… [more]
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I thought the new year would be a good time to post a wee update on book sales: to date, I’ve shifted 35,284 ebooks. That’s mainly Coffin Dodgers, which has sold 14,679 copies against 18,461 promotional giveaways. Looking at the figures there’s a definite downwards trend when it comes to the effectiveness of freebies: in… [more]
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Walt Mossberg, one of the world’s best known tech writers, has written about platforms and their defenders. While comparing tech firms’ fans to religious devotees is one of the oldest cliches in the book, he’s right about the behaviour of people who believe their choice of computer, smartphone or games console is superior to others’… [more]
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This post is sponsored by Grammarly, the free online plagiarism checker. I’m a big fan of crime series. There’s something particularly enjoyable about opening the pages of a brand new book and encountering a familiar face, a familiar world, a familiar cast of characters. Take John Rebus, for example: while Ian Rankin’s non-Rebus thrillers are… [more]
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I wrote a wee piece about impostor syndrome for .net, and it’s made its way online. The satirical website The Daily Mash has a great slogan on one of its T-shirts. “I’m brilliant,” it says, “and everyone else is an arse.” It’s the perfect motto for anyone working in a creative industry, because there’s a very good… [more]
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…until you’ve checked that features you depend upon haven’t been removed. Apple’s done its software thing again: it’s released what’s supposed to be a brand new version of an existing program, but really it’s a brand new program using a familiar name. As this support discussion shows, upgrading to Pages 5.0 means losing a lot… [more]
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I’ve been pretty quiet about my fiction writing lately, and there’s been a good reason for that: I haven’t been doing any fiction writing. The sequel to Coffin Dodgers has stalled because the central crime I came up with was too horrible for a fairly light-hearted read, and the other, more serious book I was… [more]
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I have a weakness for odd guitars I can’t play very well, and while I can’t really indulge it like I used to – purchases such as my much-missed 12-string Fender Strat were in the days of carefree credit card abuse, and I’m more responsible / have less available credit now – I’ll still find… [more]
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Last one, I promise. It’s just to let you know that the album is now available for free streaming on Soundcloud, free download / pay-what-you-want on Bandcamp, and paid-for downloads on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play and CD Baby. According to CD Baby, which distributes the music for us, the list of sites and services includes Spotify,… [more]
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I wrote this one at the same time as Don’t Let Me Lose Tonight, fully expecting to finish it in 2007. I missed that deadline a little bit, but the version you can hear now isn’t dramatically different from the version I had then: the mix is better, but I found that I couldn’t better… [more]
Read me in books
My debut memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was a Scotsman book of the year and Damian Barr’s Literary Salon book of the week, and it was shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards book of the year in the Discover category.
My latest book, Small Town Joy, is a celebration of queer influences on and queer artists in Scots music and is out now.
I’m also a contributor to the excellent anthology Fierce Salvage, which is also out now.
