Current writing

Since September, I've been working on a series of short stories, mostly old ideas or half-finished fiction that I've put on the back burner, but decided after Milford to finish. This has been successful, and I am now on number eight. They're a mix of SF and Fantasy, the latter mainly drawn from UK folklore, but a couple of them verge on horror.

I have not contributed much to the recent SFWA issue, having been disgusted with 90% of the reaction on both sides and the apparent inability of people who profess to be genre writers to put themselves into other people's shoes (again, on both sides). I think anything I have to say about gender is in the novels, which is where it should be - I think one's work is more important than one's blog - and that may be all I have to say about it (I also find that I am getting increasingly tired of the sound of my own voice on the non-fictional page). I've been looking back over my early reading, which consisted of a combination of male and female writers, and when I was in my early teens, whether the protagonist was male or female was largely irrelevant to me. What mattered more were the worldbuilding and the prose (hence Vance, LeGuin, Bradbury, Cooper, to name but a few). I have always been more interested in the alien than the human (invoking the alien leads us, in any case, to comprehend ourselves), and in landscape. That set of preoccupations has remained with me, along with a deepening interest in folklore and nature writing: I am increasingly reading people like Robert MacFarlane, Roger Deakin and Sara Maitland for pleasure, whereas SFF is confined to work, although there are exceptions and like most of us, I go through phases.