My copy of the Edinburgh Book Festival programme arrived yesterday – and it seems I’m in it. If you happen to be north of the border on Thursday 21st August, then do come along. If it helps, think of it as spending £9 to see the excellent James Harkin (a bargain!) and getting me for [...]

Every day, I get at least one email asking me why I haven’t updated Haikurious for a while. These tend to be from people who don’t read the blog, or follow me on Twitter, and so haven’t heard me whining on about how busy I am with things that – occasionally – pay the bills.
Unfortunately [...]

I’ve spent the entire day, holed up in a hotel room, drinking dangerous (physically and mentally) amounts of coffee and gorging on mini-bar Pringles. I’m writing, you see. The bonus chapter for The Book, plus something new and exciting that I can’t talk about.
Music up to 11, Do Not Disturb sign on the door. Just [...]

Anyone who knows me well will know that I’ve never really seen eye-to-eye with the writing of Douglas Coupland. In fact, I once wrote the following review thing for The Penny (sigh).
Have a read and see if you can work out how delighted I was to read the back cover copy of the preview of [...]

Jason Calacanis – co-founder of Weblogs (Inc) which sold to AOL for $30million – has quit blogging. Or more specifically, he has decided to stop publicly blogging and instead to send out a kind of email/blog hybrid. What we used to call in the old days ‘an email newsletter’. This decision – we, the Internet, [...]

A few weeks ago, when I was up in the Valle (as it were), I did a telephone interview with the delightful Danuta Kean for the Orion website. The resulting ‘featured author’ profile is now live. Here’s the first half; click the link at the bottom (or here) for the rest…
(Oh, and the ‘makes him [...]

“The event’s organiser, Mike Butcher, took to the stage and introduced our panel. A couple of years earlier we’d had a very public spat after he wrote an article accusing me of using my Guardian column for blatant self-promotion (he was absolutely right, of course, but there was no need to draw attention to it). [...]

“Richard Moross is thirty years old, and a taller, better dressed man you will struggle to meet. There’s a scene in the film Men in Black where Will Smith is being indoctrinated into the MI B agency. He’s taken to a completely white locker room and Rip Torn’s character gives him ‘the last suit you’ll [...]

“And there it was. An entire website dedicated to me – created by Karen and full of details of our relationship, stories about how much of a crap boyfriend I had been in every single way. How her friends had always hated me. How I was a worthless ‘douchebag’ (her favourite word ). But it [...]

“If you close your eyes after reading his email, you can almost see Nicholas Hellen sitting at his desk, masturbating furiously, imagining he’s Carl Bernstein phoning John Mitchell during the Watergate scandal…  ‘Sir, this is Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, and I’m sorry to bother you but we’re running a story in tomorrow’s paper [...]