Monumentally distracted from writing today by the extraordinary Durrow Scarecrow Festival. I'd meant to go for a few years now and never quite made it, so I was determined to do so this year. I also have a project (half-academic, half-creative) percolating in my brain to do with Irish Folk Gothic, and I rather thought the trip could be classified under - and therefore justified as - fieldwork. The festival is nothing short of amazing. There's an official 'contained' scarecrow

Looking back, it strikes me as hilariously optimistic that my first ever voyage into writing was a novel, an unnamed opus I vaguely called The House Project. I crashed into it with great enthusiasm, came up with some genuinely creepy ideas, then got to a certain stage and it all…just fizzled out. Too much had happened too soon; I had the uneasy feeling that it was becoming repetitive; I couldn’t figure out where it was going to go. In writing, hesitation can be as fatal as on

Story #12 accepted by Hydra Publications for a dystopian anthology and Story #13 taken by the lovely A Murder of Storytellers for a new anthology in October 2015. Exciting times!

Oh man! It's finally arrived; that time period that seemed the stuff of dreams a mere few weeks ago. Post Thesis Submission Time. And not only that, it's also Post Viva Time! Yes, I'm now a doctor, licensed to write at will and prescribe books for everyone! This PhD has been an amazing ride. It's buoyed up my confidence in myself and my writing. For the first time in a long time, I don't feel like a fraud when around other academics, now I'm a 'proper' member of the tribe. Of