She kissed him lightly on the forehead and smiled. As the clear plastic lid of his ‘coffin’ slowly sank to the closed position he read her lips say: ‘Night, night’.

She’d said he wouldn’t dream but she’d been wrong about that. From the moment Stock felt consciousness slipping away, his mind was filled with bright colours and echoing voices. Random images, fragments of memory distorted by sleeping reason, danced lightly before his mind’s eye. He was a child again, living high up in the Enwhy Hirise with his mother.

(more…)

ACDoyle leans across the black marble bar and tunes the old-fashioned radio to a blues station. Uh huh. The bar is filled with the strum of double-bass and the twang of steel guitar. His Raindrop sandals make flopping noises on the hessian rug as he walks through the seating area that is loosely shaded from the digital sun by the folds of a canvas awning.

(more…)

Monday

Stopped at the lights.

The rearview shows me the edge of fatigue. His eyes are bulked, the swollen skin of the lids pressing down insistently. He’s fighting it and the battle is telling.

(more…)

The battered old camper van turned into the car park noisily stirring the gravel. The attendant pulled his green bobble hat down more firmly over his ears and approached it, absently jingling the change in his leather shoulder-bag.

The driver wound down the window. He was swarthy, dark-haired with two or three day’s stubble on his chin, eyes shadowed and hooded with weeks of bad sleep.

(more…)

God, I hate this story. I didn’t want to write it, they MADE me. I wrote Mother to Be when I 19 to fulfil a creative writing assignment at college. The assignment was one of those formula-based things, A meets B, A falls in love with B, etc, etc. As a 19-year-old just off the leash the last thing I wanted to write was love stories. It’s here because the naivete of it makes me cringe and and it’s as well I have a reminder around that the stuff I think is so clever today might not seem so bloody smart in ten years time. It also holds the distinction of being the first thing I ever had published, in an end-of-year student anthology.

(more…)

I remember dying vividly. Fear will do that.

I suppose it’s a biological mechanism of the utmost irony that those experiences we associate with the danger of death are imprinted so indelibly on our memories, especially the event itself.

(more…)

The release of the Rome: Total War demo led to a discussion about use of the wedge formation by Roman infantry. I thought I remembered something about it used to defeat Boudica, so I looked it up. I’d forgotten what an utterly perfect picture of human savagery the story of the Iceni Queen is.

(more…)

I get accused quite often of reading too much into casual observations. I probably do but it’s probably because I find people fascinating, not just the obviously interesting ones but also those ‘ordinary’ people that you might just pass in the street. Every individual has their own album of stories and it irks me irrationally when I see a glimpse of something interesting but the details are denied to me.

(more…)

I can’t stand being in Boots (the chemist, not the footwear), especially the cosmetics section, so sterile, plastic and chemically synthesised. Just walking around the place gives me a headache, but it’s one of those dubious headaches that I worry will lead to maniacal shouting, the pushing over of lipstick displays and the shaking by the shoulders of artificially enhanced shop assistants. So I usually wait outside.

(more…)

This may turn a little manifesto, but forgive me. It’s a juvenile form, but such posturing can occasionally serve a purpose. And sometimes, as Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting is currently informing me, just saying it could even make it happen.

I return from Delfter Krug and an evening with comrades. After the traditional lusting after barmaids and discussing the various challenges facing the geek nation, we turn to one of the conversations that I, as a devotee of the gaming press, prayed that was happening somewhere in the universe at any particularly moment.

It was, simply, Games Journalism: Where now?

(more…)