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The call went to voicemail last week, while I was in the shower.

When I returned to my desk, I saw the call had come from my friend

For some months, I've been working on my second novel for Orbit Books. It's going great now, thanks for asking, but in the early days the book hurled some alarming curveballs right at my face, because that's what books do.

Smoke grenades led me staggering down blind alleys of narrative. Characters who had once seemed integral to the story, actually needed to be winched clean out of the manuscript forever, taking many thousands of words with them. Ideas that had once seemed great in my head, ac...

For some months, I've been working on my second novel for Orbit Books. It's going great now, thanks for asking, but in the early days the book hurled some alarming curveballs right at my face, because that's what books do.

Smoke grenades led me staggering down blind alleys of narrative. Characters who had once seemed integral to the story, actually needed to be winched clean out of the manuscript forever, taking many thousands of words with them. Ideas that had once seemed great in my head, ac...

I don't go on ferris wheels, but they're fun to watch. So when the Brighton Wheel was being built on the seafront five years ago, I found a suitable vantage point to take a few snaps.

And now sadly, the Brighton Wheel has gone, to make way for the ludicrous donut on a stick that is the i360. But I took a few snaps of the wheel being dismantled too.

So here, for your pleasure, is The Rise And Fall Of The Brighton Wheel. (Click on Read More to reveal the photo gallery.)

Indie film-making veteran Roger Corman is 90 years old today!

This man's incredible CV stretches back to the 1950s. Since then, he's brought us the likes of The Little Shop Of Horrors (1960), The Pit And The Pendulum (1961), Dementia 13 (1963), Death Race 2000 (1975), Pirahna (1978), Galaxy Of Terror (1981), Frankenstein Unbound (1990) and so very many more. He continues to make films to this day, with Death Race 2050 in production as we speak.

And here's a fact that only early adopters of my b...

Roughly ten billion books vie for your attention at any given time. So why should you go for The Last Days Of Jack Sparks? This list of reasons goes up to eleven... 1) iBOOKS LOVE IT
The good people of Apple's iBooks store have made The Last Days Of Jack Sparks one of their books of March 2016! And oh my good God, that’s not out of all the ‘genre� books � that’s all the books. So Jack Sparks rubs shoulders with the likes of Maestra by LS Hilton, What Happened, Miss Simone? by A...

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Jack Sparks, the pop culture celebrity-journo and broadcaster, died under mysterious circumstances in late 2014.

And yet today, in the pages of his book The Last Days Of Jack Sparks, he is reborn.

Publication day is a bitter-sweet affair for me on this particular title, because I was lucky enough to meet Jack before his terrible downward spiral began. Oh, we never really became friends - I kinda got the impression that Jack didn't really have any, apart from maybe his flatmate Bex - but we'd ru...

Last June, I was super-psyched to announce my two-book deal with Orbit Books for the UK and Commonwealth territories.

The US publisher, though, has remained shrouded in mystery, like some kind of cloaked hitchhiker waiting on a moonlit grass verge to rip out your spleen and shove it in your glove compartment.

I can now reveal that the publisher for The Last Days Of Jack Sparks and the next bookin the US and Canadais... Orbit Books!

Which is such great news. Here are just three of the many reason...

Obsessed with word counts, me? How dare you. That Post-It note seen to the left, that's just me getting some simple arithmetic horribly wrong. It's definitely not me keeping a running tally of my latest total word count on the new novel, twice a day.

Okay, I'll admit it: I use the ongoing word count on a novel as a means of gauging my achievements. And I totally write down the latest figure, using one of those antiquated old-school 'pens'. Like most habits connected with writing, it's good and...