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I’ve been speaking to some interesting people in ebook-land over the last few weeks, and it’s only fair to give them a mention here. So in no particular order, here goes: Mark Edwards and Louise Voss are doing extraordinary things – as I write this, Catch Your Death and Killing Cupid are at numbers 1… [more]
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I made a thing! So here it is: my debut novel, shiny and new on the Kindle store (or at least, the UK one. The US one needs another couple of days). I’ve set up a page to talk about it without filling the entire front page of this site, but put it this… [more]
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As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m about to put my novel online in various ebook formats, and part of the process is working out how much to charge. It’s a controversial topic, so it was nice to see this post by John Rickards (which came to me via the superb Loud blog). As Rickards points out,… [more]
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This could be interesting. Businessweek: Armed with licenses from the music labels and publishers, Apple will be able to scan customers’ digital music libraries in iTunes and quickly mirror their collections on its own servers, say three people briefed on the talks. If the sound quality of a particular song on a user’s hard drive… [more]
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I spotted this on MetaFilter: a superb and desperately sad article about the rise and fall of Bill Haley. After ten minutes or so Billnitzer would bring him his food. But usually he was thinking about something, so he ignored it. After a while, though, he’d start to shift in his seat and look around.… [more]
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Me, on Techradar, about Google’s brand new Chromebooks: Ah, says Samsung. “With nothing stored directly on the Series 5, malicious spyware, trojans and viruses are a thing of the past.” They’re a thing of the past on my Windows 7 PC too, because I’m not an idiot who opens unsolicited files that claim to be… [more]
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The book isn’t ready yet but I thought Ronnie Brown’s cover design was too good to keep under wraps. More soon. [more]
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I don’t play as much as I used to, or would like to – RSI tends to rear its ugly head fairly quickly – but one of my most treasured possessions is my electric guitar, a 1989 Fender Telecaster. I bought it second-hand a loooooong time ago, and I’ve been meaning to get it sorted… [more]
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When people like me get worked up about ISP censorship, national firewalls and other wonderful ideas, it’s not because we condone theft. It’s because the people who do the censoring are often idiots. Here’s yet another example: the UK Music Publisher’s Association (MPA) managed to get an entire public domain music site taken offline because… [more]
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An illuminating piece by David Hepworth: When you have built up some anticipation around the release of anything, what on earth is the use of delaying that release and allowing that anticipation to fade into disinterest? Public attention is a finite resource and it is quickly diverted on to something else. [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.
