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To the tune of Love Shack by the B52s. Yes, after months of pondering and the odd Twitter poll, I’ve decided to follow in the footsteps of Salman Rushdie, Chuck Palahnuik and many others and see what this Substack thing is all about. My reasoning, and my plan, can be summarised thusly: Publishing as weContinue reading “Substack, Baby, Substack”

Good morning, good morning, as the Beatles famously said. It’s Saturday and I’m at my desk preparing to go live to a potential audience of 7 billion. Potential. Japan Writer’s Conference has kicked off and sadly we’re online again. Still, that means potentially 7 billion of you could attend (could Zoom handle that? Wanna findContinue reading “Good Day Sunshine”

Hey there folks of world, I’ve been meaning to do an update for a while but life got in the way. I needed a moment of procrastination on something else to kick my arse into updating the site and here it is! So the book is out in the world and is being well receivedContinue reading “A Flurry of Activity”

After a few days of camping and hiking in northern Gifu, I returned to three boxes waiting patiently in my garage. Better than Christmas morning, you can see my reaction to clapping eyes for the first time on the amazing work Liminal Ink has done putting this book together. The book is out on SeptemberContinue reading “Unboxing (my favourite sport)”

This is my sixth book and the excitement never lessens. If anything it increases with each book as the anxiety about “what comes next” decreases with experience. Not that there’s no anxiety, just that it’s tempered with understanding. The cover was designed by Paul Docherty, one of the founders of Liminal Ink, and I absolutelyContinue reading “Cover and Quotes”

It came around quicker than I thought, and here it is: me talking about Japanese literature on Radio 4’s Open Book. It’s also available as a podcast (under BBC Books and Authors). I haven’t listened to it yet because… well, if it’s bad I’ll have to curl up somewhere and never speak to the worldContinue reading “Live(ish) at the BBC”

So Thursday night was a busy one for me. At 7pm I gave a lecture/reading about me/my work as part of Lakeland University Japan’s ongoing series. It’s a great scheme they’ve got going, bringing in people of all different walks of life to talk to their students and the wider public and I was delightedContinue reading “Lakeland Lectures & the BBC”

You may have seen a few social media posts regarding this, but here’s the full story about my new book! It’s called Life is Elsewhere/Burn Your Flags, and is a novella set during the pandemic in Japan. Here’s the official blurb: Christmas Day, 2020 and in Japan, Cormac is headed for the hills. In theContinue reading “New Book!”

So this was a thing! On Wednesday last, as I type, I did an event at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club Japan. Hosted by Swiss journalist Christoph Neidhart, I did some readings from The Only Gaijin in the Village, and then we did a Q&A. The FCCJ is a pretty big deal and just getting invitedContinue reading “Live at the FCCJ”

It’s been a while since I last posted here, mainly because there’s been nothing to say. This area of Japan was in a state of emergency for a while (a state of emergency is like a lockdown but enforced by peer pressure rather than punishments) so like most people around the world we’ve gone nowhere,Continue reading “Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will”