“Literature fans should welcome AI as a fellow wordsmith,” runs the header on a long (overlong) article I just read. A fellow wordsmith? Pardon my hollow laughter. This week I got this AI-generated message purporting to be from “Kathryn Riggs, a senior editor at Skyhorse publishing”, enthusing about my career and wanting to open a…

On the left is the jacket flap photo from Down River, circa 1988. Which is about ten years on from my first writing sale, if you want to be picky. The shot on the right is from March this year (2026), taken on Golden Lane in Prague. Behind me is number 22, a tiny cottage…

From the Penguin Books website: A collection of suspense-filled thrillers from master of the genre Stephen Gallagher A listening treat for fans of gripping drama: eight thrillers, plus a bonus story, from ‘the finest British writer of bestselling popular fiction since Le Carré’. Full of suspense and utterly immersive with full-cast production values, this collection…

This year’s stocking-filler chapbook in aid of Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) is The Adventure of the Seven Unnatural Women, a Sherlock Holmes story written at the invitation of J R Campbell and Charles Prepolec, editors of the Gaslight series of Holmes anthologies. It made its first appearance in Gaslight Ghouls. The slender 58-page…

It’s over two decades now since I pitched a new take on Dracula to the BBC, secured the commission, wrote the script, and saw the entire project canned on the very day I delivered it due to (I was told) a Drama exec’s capricious decision after lunch with an indie producer who hinted at a…

What follows is a post from my old Blogger journal, now retired but still out there haunting the internet. The original post was dated October 2009 and was written in California. The Cars of the Stars museum is no more and its collection is dispersed, alas, so don’t go looking for it. The night before…

The radio drama that led to me being considered for Doctor Who, now back on air after several decades as a ‘lost’ programme (BBC Radio 4 Extra, 23.06.2025). Created for Radio 4’s Saturday Night Theatre in 1979, the play was broadcast in a special run of technically ambitious dramas titled Hi-Fi Theatre. Producer Martin Jenkins…

I’d forgotten this, just now came across it. A couple of years ago the Horror Writers Association was looking into issues of ageism in publishing and I guess my having been around the block a few times made me a likely candidate for an opinion or two. Here’s how it went: * Did you start…

Nick Clegg is claiming that asking artists for use permission would ‘kill’ the AI industry, and the general response of the creative community to that has been, ‘Fine’. But some overdue effort needs to be put into distinguishing between AI’s useful handling of complex data and the unauthorised lifting of copyrighted material. I’ve recently been…

So it’s World Dracula Day, according to Bing. Which I don’t use. But which I can’t effectively get rid of without sabotaging my operating system. Anyway… In 2018 I wrote about the publication of Dark Mirages, a book presenting unproduced treatments and screenplays by writers with genre credentials, each with a story behind it. In…