Where is my mind?

See, I don’t know about you, but I feel like I used to be able to focus on one thing for hours on end, without my thoughts snaking off to other stuff.

Okay, maybe not hours on end, but at least for ten goddamn minutes.

One preoccupation shared by my novels Ghoster and The Last Days Of Jack Sparks is this: what has the internet done to our brains? I love the online world and yet I also fear its power. I fear its ability to warp, reshape or downright damage our puny human grey matter…

​Like so many potentially intimidating things in life, judgement is inevitable. We cast our own nano-second judgements on other people, all day, every day, regardless of whether we’re on Tinder, reading Twitter (oh dear God, the Twitter court room, where people are either Good or Evil) or walking down the street. For better or for worse, it’s what we humans do. Meerkats almost certainly don’t mentally rate the attractiveness or intelligence of other meerkats out of 10 on first sight, or even twenty-seventh sight, but it seems our judgemental nature is simply a cross we have to bear. …

To ensure that we all start on the same page with this, let me explain the difference between the proofreading process and, say, the copy-edit.

The copy-editor reads your novel and makes a whole bunch of suggestions. Sometimes these are ways in which a sentence might flow more smoothly, be clearer in meaning or just be downright better. Other times, the copy-editor might identify a logic problem to ask you about. A potential plot-hole, in other words.

Just like the rest of the edit process, copy editing is awesome. Copy editors are horribly unsung, given that they can make you…

I recently committed to two new stressful things.

Namely, sending my newsletter The Necronoppicon out fortnightly, and uploading a new video to my YouTube channel Jason Arnopp’s Terrifying House Of Obsession every single Sunday. This has imposed a rigid new structure to my working weeks. Even though this structure has applied more pressure to me, I wouldn’t have it any other way, because hard deadlines are our friends. Stick with me and I’ll tell you how you can use deadlines to get more creativity done, no matter what level you’re currently at.

Here’s the thing: without a deadline for a…

The first thing to note here is that movie censorship still very much happens. Certainly in the UK, the British Board of Film Classification regularly bans films altogether, so it’s not as if we’re suddenly living in the glorious freedom of Amsterdam, where movies would probably have to break all kinds of real-life laws just to raise an eyebrow.

However, there is so much less censorship than there used to be in the crazy 1980s, when horror films would fall foul of the censor’s scissors simply for daring to present an exploding head. …

Hello! This article features no spoilers about The Walking Dead, except for speaking generally about how very unpleasant the show’s Season Seven premiere was. But you probably gathered that anyway.

The Walking Dead’s Season Seven premiere has stirred a tidal wave of online think pieces. Many of these ask whether the show has finally overstepped some kind of imaginary mark. Some of them downright state this as fact.

In Its Season Premiere, The Walking Dead’s Brutal Violence Finally Went Too Far

Maybe The Walking Dead Went Too Far With The Gore This Time

The Walking Dead: Has Gore On Television…