Obi-Wan Kenobi is on my shit list

The chair I bought to complement my shiny new desk was from Habitat. A couple of years ago they approached a number of prominent names and got them to design stuff for their 40th anniversary. Ewan McGregor designed a fold-up director’s chair with extra padding that initially went on sale for £150. Well I got […]

The Minutiae of Writing – 2. The Desk

My old desk is in Leicester, at my wife’s father’s house, a big place with a big room where a lot of our stuff has been stored for (gulp) over five years now. He’s a nice man, that David Carrier. Patience of a saint. Or maybe he just forgot about the room and we can […]

What’s next?

I don’t know. I always get this scary stretch of white space unfurling in my head when I finish a novel. It’s an ideas path. And there’s nothing on it. Well, that’s not true, but I often feel that the ideas I do have aren’t going to see me through 300 pages of story. I’ve […]

The Minutiae of Writing – I. The Study

I love talking to other writers about the way they go about this insane profession of ours. Perhaps it’s because we spend so much time alone, or perhaps it’s just that I have a fetish for writing implements… So every so often I’ll give you a glimpse of my life as a scrivener. I’ve been […]

The Unblemished

The funny thing about winning the award was that I received the news on the day I finished rewriting the book… Yes, don’t adjust your set, I was rewriting TU for the paperback edition which comes out in the UK and USA in April 2008. My new editor at Virgin wanted some changes, despite the […]

Stephen King, you took one hell of a beating…

So it’s a week or so after my novel THE UNBLEMISHED won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Novel. The last seven days have been one big grin. I am so happy. A couple of weeks previously I’d been up for two awards at the British Fantasy Awards. I came away empty-handed, but there […]

International Horror Guild Awards

Conrad’s novel The Unblemished beat a strong shortlist, which included Stephen King, to Best Novel at the International Horror Guild Awards in Saratoga Springs, New York last night.Woo hoo!