… I am, for the first time since… oooh… can’t really remember… sitting down and thinking about what to do next. Don’t get me wrong: I’m gonna write more books next. ‘Cos writing is awesome. And there’ll be more edits on the current book, but hopefully they’ll be far less intense. But I’m also at the end of a contract, and under pressure to write for TV and honestly, the sky is full of vasty possibilities. More Claire North books? Space opera? High fantasy? Historical drama? 6-part TV series full of cool lighting? Dunno. I’ve got an ideas list as…

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To my delight and gratitude, 84K has been shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award for 2019! It’s an amazing shortlist to be on, and an award with an incredible heritage and legacy, so I’m very excited to be considered to say the least. In my Dad’s old papers and books, of which there are thousands, there are a couple of objects which are prized possessions. A copy of “So Long And Thanks For All The Fish” by Douglas Adams, signed “So long and thanks for all the lunch”; several uncorrected proofs of works that would go on to be…

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When this blog started, I had the same phone I’d had at school. It made calls; it received calls. That was all. That was all I needed. It probably still is. However, since then, the world has lurched forward, and I’ll admit that right now, I am pretty dependent on my phone. Especially in gigs, where as a lighting engineer you spend a lot of time waiting around for something interesting to happen. During this hiatus, I spend a fair amount of time on my phone, listening to the music of whoever I’ve gonna light, and during breaks emailling and…

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Happy Christmas all! Another solar orbit done, and not gonna lie, 2018 has had a fair number of downs, as well as some truly extraordinary ups. 2019 looks like it will also be a bit of an adventure, especially in the UK as we lurch towards what could well prove to be one of the biggest constitutional disasters of living memory (hurrah!), but hell, least we can do is keep talking and trying. Thank you everyone who’s been so supportive and generous in all these months; it means the world to me. If I have any New Year Resolutions, I…

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It surprises me how, years later, a blog post I wrote about being a woman doing a martial art is still getting comments.  Particularly, people are STILL debating the merit of hitting a guy in the nuts as a tool of self-defence.  Most don’t really have much of a relationship with this other than “oh yeah, I saw that in a movie once, it seemed to work”.  Some will explain in detail why it doesn’t; a few have expressed outrage and horror that I would even say much a thing, and one individual announced my remark about male genitalia in…

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