For the special Stephen King double edition of French magazine Ténèbres, I was asked to write a review/homage to my favourite Stephen King novel. I chose Carrie. Here it is in English for the first time.

Kaaron Warren posted a series of interviews with authors concerning the spark behind their stories. Here’s mine, in which I reveal the inspiration behind The Crooked Letter and the First Church of the Cataclysm.

Arthur J Rees published The Shrieking Pit in 1918. Chimaera Publications reissued it as part of their Classic Australian SF series to coincide with the Melbourne WorldCon of 2010. Little did I know what a complicated backstory I would uncover when I started researching for my introduction . . . .

Exactly what it says it is. It arose out of a light-hearted conversation with Angela Slatter, who had lots of excellent suggestions. So did many other people. I'm not sure what value it is, but it was a fun exercise and I think the world is better for having it.

Here's the link to the original LiveJournal page.

Invited to contribute to 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists, what else could I write about but how Doctor Who killed my naive infatuation with God?

Kurt von Trojan was a South Australian science fiction writer, one of the first Australian SF writers I ever really engaged with, both on the page and in the person. It was a great tragedy when he died of cancer in 2006, and I was touched to be asked to show my appreciation in a collection of fiction published to honour him.

I'm asked a lot for advice either from or on behalf of new writers. How to get started, how to succeed--that kind of stuff. I find this difficult because (a) there are no rules (despite there being plenty of opinions) and (b) usually I'm being asked in the context of an interview or an email exchange in which an exhaustive reply is neither expected nor, I suspect, wanted.

Here's a link to my attempt at a short answer that covers every important issue in as brief a time as possible. It's a LiveJournal page that contains lots of conversation, the text of a speech I give every now and again, and links to related topics.

This speech was first presented at Brisbane Writers’ Festival. The title was the brief, and this is how I chose to explore it.

Click here to see the text of that speech.

I was excited to be one of the Guests of Honor at Convergence 2002: The 41st Australian National Science Fiction Convention. But what to talk about during my GOH speech? I chose to reminisce about how music had influenced my writing, and why 1981 was the best year of all (so far).

Click here to see the text of that speech.

Stephen Dedman's first collection contains some of the best stories to come out of this country. The brief for the intro came at the very last minute (almost literally), however, so the question of what to write and how to write it was a critical one. Thus, with the help of Simon Brown (channelling the spirit of a dead race horse called Mark Radium) and lots of bad puns, "Flogging a Dead Horse" came into being.

An essay co-written with Simon Brown and published in the debut issue of Altair.