When was 2007? Nearly twenty years ago. Jesus, that's a long time. In 2007, I bought some school exercise books from WH Smith and I hand wrote a novel called Ark Noon. I wanted to write my own Riddley Walker but without the complexity of distorted language. Just a story of a flooded future. Was it about climate change? Maybe. Although, the rains that bring the flood seem sudden, almost supernatural really, or at least cataclysmic.

I'm toying with a new title for this novel. Maybe just 'Gap'. Not like the clothes shop. Or maybe 'The Gaps'. I still can't find the focus of time to really dive into this and give it a fourth edit. I'm not sure if it needs it or whether it's where it should be. This chapter is one I really like - it's basically Callan and the other prisoners travelling in the police van to Hallerfleck.

You wake and know that you stayed up all night waiting for phone calls. You wake and you remember that you dreamt you are a phone call. You wake and you ring off the hook. You wake and you believe you are a dog. You wake and you believe you are Laika in Sputnik flying towards oblivion. You wake and you cannot breathe.

Years ago, I wrote some poems on scraps of paper on the bus from Huyton to Warrington. I wrote more while working in a soul-crushing office job. Over a couple of years I edited them into a collection. I was reading a fair whack of Geoffrey Hill, TS Eliot, Hope Mirrlees, Tom Raworth and Roy Fisher. The collection is fragmented, leaps between cultural references I'm not sure why I was referencing anymore and pretty everyday observations that I assume came from that bus journey.

My dad left school really young and started working on the docks in Liverpool at a rice mill called Heap's. I think he was maybe 15. He was lifting huge sacks of rice with a docker's hook. His workmates were all older, seasoned rum drinkers. He told me once he became an expert rum drinker too, drank a whole bottle on the morning bus home from Liverpool to Huyton.

In these chapters of Yrtneon, Gid becomes worried about his sister, Stacey, after he finds her trying to cut their dog's tail and behaving just really strangely. This is the point of transition from our world into the 'other' world, the point where the novel moves from a kind of realism with a speculative edge to full on fantasy. In these chapters, Gid is led by a mysterious voice to a pond where he is given the chance to save his sister.

There are many betrayals in Black Tarn Gap and Callan learns to cope with them with a numb acceptance. I worry sometimes I've invested too much of a sense of defeat in Callan, that I've tried to portray him as understanding the futility of standing against a system but believing in the importance of holding on to your individuality, but maybe that characterisation is too internal and too accepting.

Here's a story about sacrifice and choices. I'm pretty sure it was inspired by The Lottery by Shirley Jackson but I was also reading a bit of grim dark at the time so it pushes more into fantasy. GOD’S WORK The hills were behind him and the river ahead of him. Here, where the river at low tide became treacherous mudflats and sudden sandbanks before washing out north into that dark sea, there had been a city once but now there was only a village, and it was to the village he came.

A few years ago, I had an idea to write a poetry collection where all the poems formed a narrative. Not exactly a new idea. I've always liked maps and imagined worlds, so I thought why not write a collection of connected poems about an imagined world (not so different from ours) where those connections between the poems come together to tell a story.

Years ago (I think maybe 2007) I wrote a poem about cormorants. Years later I edited and edited and edited that poem until it became a different poem. Here's the first one, The Cormorants, and its mutated/improved/evolved/damaged echo. First draft The Cormorants They are being called in land to fish, leaving sea and harsh waves for gentle streams, their wings outstretched amongst reeds, on river bends.

Here's a strange story about love and betrayal. It's probably inspired by the writing of George Saunders, Barthelme too. It's a pretty sad story and I suppose in a way it's a dystopian story. I'm sorry about what I've done to Brown Bear 15's life. PORCUPINE 77 I tell you, the minute Brown Bear 15 saw Porcupine 77 he was in love.

I'm getting married in two weeks so here's a poem from my collection Shapeshifters about love. I wrote it after my future wife came for a meal at my house back when we were only dating. I think I made tapas. Robin And then I saw a robin settle on the table where I’d placed our meal. You’d called to say you were close.

When I was at UEA, I took a module called Art of Short Fiction (I think that's what it was called), which was taught by the amazing Philip Langeskov. This was in the second half of the year, when I was pretty set on the fact I was writing a novel for my dissertation but had found myself writing short stories on the train down to Norwich.

Before I started on an MA at UEA, I was writing a novel about AI. It was set on a beach (is it really a beach - a river bank) near Liverpool Airport called Oglet Shore. Hence the title of the book. The book was about three siblings living on this riverbank/beach in a near future version of Liverpool/UK where AI/androids existed.

Bridge, false barrow of steel, a black wing at rest, contorting distance. As if I could step that way and never begin. A door closed. Nothing will pass or sink into forgetting. The bridge sleeps, blinks at shutter sharp light, slanting shafts stabbing at glass and solid fact. There are no boats easing out. Inland, the future is silted, a wading bird letting itself remain calm beneath guardian iron.

I think my writing is literary. I like getting into the heads of my characters, crafting poetic sentences, exploring emotions, but also playing with plots that start with 'what if' questions. I'm a speculative writer - my first novel was about the threat of nuclear war, the second was about cloning, the third was about a fascist dystopia, my first children's novel was about parallel universes, I wrote a book about supernatural powers, the book I'm working on now is about demons and false prophets, and the one I want to write for my PhD is about a near future damaged by climate change.

I can't remember the last time I sent a poem out to a magazine but I still write poetry almost every day. I think that's partly to do with a string of rejections that inevitably dampen the spirit but there's also something to me about the whole world of poetry that makes me see it as a hundred walls that need climbing rather than the, maybe, one wall you have to climb with fiction.

I love this book. Like properly love it because it represents everything I wanted to be as a writer when I was a kid. Back then I read Elidor and The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by my hero Alan Garner, The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper and of course, everything Tolkien wrote. I created my own stories using my Lego figures to bring them into the reality of my bedroom.

This chapter deepens the psychological horror of what Callan and those imprisoned with him are going through. In a way it introduces the idea of the "gaps," where prisoners literally vanish with all records erased. Maybe that's a metaphor for historical revisionism and the state's power to erase not just a person, but their very existence, or maybe it's just about the easy control of those sickened by ephemeral power.