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I’m hopeless at catching programmes when they’re actually broadcast, so it’s taken me a while to get round to watching the DCI Banks adaptations of Peter Robinson’s books. I like the books, but I encountered exactly the same problem I had with the recent dramatisation of Mark Billingham’s DI Thorne novels. No, not the annoying… [more]
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A new ebook publisher launches later today: Blasted Heath. I need to declare an interest – one of the founders is a friend of mine who occasionally pays me to write things – but I think what they’re doing is really interesting: they’re picking authors who they believe deserve a bigger profile and marketing the… [more]
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I love Tim Dorsey, and I don’t need to finish When Elves Attack to urge everyone to buy it. It’s typical Dorsey, which means it’s superbly deranged Floridian tomfoolery that had me hooting with delight by the second paragraph – which, in this case, is a 93-year-old explaining why she’s gone off sex. If you haven’t… [more]
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Nokia’s keynote this morning wasn’t quite what I was hoping for. “Our ambition is to surprise you at every turn,” said Kevin Shields, a man whose job title – senior vice president of program and product management for the smart device – is longer than many people’s lives. And then he started shouting. “It looks… [more]
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“Gary Marshall,” writes Amazon.com, “are you looking for something in our Tablets department? If so, you might be interested in these items.” It’s almost as if Amazon wants you to look at one tablet in particular, isn’t it? [more]
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My friends at Techradar like the iPhone 4S, it seems, and they’ve put together a typically exhaustive review. Executive summary: if you have an iPhone 4, there’s no real need to upgrade once you’ve installed iOS. If you’ve got an older iPhone, however, the 4GS is a huge upgrade. I’d like to get my hands… [more]
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I hadn’t seen this before: the famous “here’s to the crazy ones” Apple ad with a different voiceover artist. The version that aired was narrated by Richard Dreyfuss, but this version was voiced by Steve Jobs. Naturally it’s all the more poignant now. [more]
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Steve Jobs’ obituary on Techradar. I was getting a bit teary as I was writing the end of it. We’ve lost a giant. [more]
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The most excellent Simon Royle publishes what he calls indieviews, interviews with indie authors. And today it’s my turn to talk bollocks. I’ve lost track of the number of times a supposedly smart, glass ceiling-shattering female character suddenly becomes a simpering idiot thanks to Captain Exposition. This kind of thing: Him: We need a laser.… [more]
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Me, at Techradar: It’s Apple’s new iPhone event tomorrow, and we know what that means: most of the internet is publishing “ten things Apple will announce tomorrow” articles, most of them split into eleventy-nine pages to rip off advertisers. [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.
