After cosmic launches in Waterstones and Daunt Books, I’ve had a few quiet days to smile about everything in the world, ever. Now the book’s out, surreal is the main theme: it’s done, it’s out, it’s on its way. It’s in people’s hands — a few strangers’ hands, even. And there are so many lovely…

  Brian’s been released into the wild, with analogue and digital versions on the shelves and available online. Big thanks to the Sandstone Press team for all the hard work they’ve put in.

… takes aspects of many genres and combines them with staccato sentences that punch with such precision that the experience of reading the novel borders on the delirious. Quite simply, The Folded Man reads like Coetzee with ADHD. Dan Ellis, probably better known as @utterbiblio, has written a belting review of THE FOLDED MAN for Litro magazine. Dan gets right into…

  For a smallish lump of squashed, sliced, graffitied tree, this beautiful-looking thing causes one of the weirdest feelings. Or even twelve of them at the same time: chufties, relief, embarrassment, hope, fear, pride, anxiety, awkwardness, gratefulness, nakedness, bewilderment, gratitude. To be honest I’m still waiting for Jeremy Beadle to bob over and show me…

Pretty much exactly two years ago I wrote a little post about nine things you can do to get yourself in the mood for writing. It’s taken about that long to think up some more. But since writing is like MRSA – grows resilient to the same old tactics, and then kills you with cigarettes,…

Not long back, Caroline Smailes put out a submission call for 100-word pieces of fiction inspired by songs on the YouTubes. Every penny from the resulting anthology would go to One in Four – an important charity that supports victims of sexual abuse and violence. From today, you can buy the finished anthology as an e-book…

The Folded Man – my Manchester-set novel about a drug-addled mermaid called Brian – has been long/short/some-kind-of-listed for the eighth Dundee International Book Prize for debut novelists. I’m not going to put any eggs in a basket because I broke them all a while ago, but it’s still and will always be the loveliest feeling…

I’ve something in a real-life book from Metazen’s sister publisher Housefire. It’s a themed anthology called Nouns of Assemblage which collects sixty-three tiny stories written around collective nouns. I went with ‘army of caterpillars’. Who knows what my mother will make of mine but it’s definitely a story about a man eating the Eiffel Tower.…

Metazen published a weeny story I wrote. It’s called The Omelette, and it isn’t about mashed eggs.