Critical Miss was a webzine covering pen-and-paper roleplaying games from a humorous slant. I was editor and lead writer, with help from the rest of my gaming crew (Bubba, General Tangent, Bog Boy, TAFKAC, and Mark). We did nine issues between 1998 and 2002, with two additional issues in 2005 and 2011. It's currently down right now for technical reasons, but I'm hoping to get it back up again. In the meantime, the logo image links to the Internet Archive copy of the site.
In the early 00s, I had a regular column on RPG humour for the UK roleplaying magazine Valkyrie Quarterly. This was the first time I'd ever been paid to be published.
Following Valkyrie, I wrote a monthly RPG humour column for Mongoose Publishing's Signs & Portents magazine. I was in the launch issue and carried on for next three years until they moved to digital only and I decided to move onto other things.
Game Night was my first novel. Self-published, initially in 2007 through Magnum Opus, and later through my own imprint Wild Jester Press, it tells the story of six Greek-style gods playing a roleplaying game, very badly, with the mortal realm below. In 2008, it was short-listed for an ENnie award in the Best Regalia category (essentially a catch-all category for things that are related to roleplaying, but aren't actually roleplaying games).
I had a story story, On Her Majesty's Deep Space Service, in Stone Skin Press's anthology of short stories, The New Hero. OHMDSS was set in a retro alternative history where space travel had become ubiquitous by the 1980s, and tells the story of Space Lieutenant Pete Stone of the Royal Space Force. I pitched it as "Dan Dare meets James Bond" which I'll admit is possibly not the most contemporary pitch.
If Pigs Could Fly, published by me in 2015, was the first novel in the West Kensington Paranormal Detective series. It tells the story of Ravinder "Rav" Shah, a West London social worker who finds that the truth is actually out there, but is a tad more real than he'd anticipated. Together with the Professor, one of his clients, and Border Collie Jess, he finds himself battling a shadowy secret society in league with ancient vampires. In this series, I was essentially trying to do for the X-Files conspiraciana genre what Douglas Adams did for SF and Terry Pratchett did for fantasy.
The Sleeping Dragon, published by me in 2018, is set in what was an almost cliched fantasy world until, some five hundred years ago, someone figured out how to commoditise magic. Now, five hundred years later, in a world in which heroism seems like an obsolete concept, five people (an adventuresport warrior, an unemployed ex-wizard, a troubled priest, a grifter, and the lead lutist of the planet's greatest rock band) find themselves tasked with saving the world.
Sticks and Stones, published by me in 2020, is the second novel in the West Kensington Paranormal Detective Agency series. Rav, the Professor, and Jess find themselves battling dark magic, with the fate of the world again in their hands.
I have a number of short stories available for free on Wattpad, including Constantinople, which is a dark alternate history story quite unlike my usual style. You can also read On Her Majesty's Deep Space Service there.