An Easter Easter Egg
I like a good Easter egg. Not a chocolate egg—I mean a secret meaning or symbol buried in a film or game or story. I included a whole bunch of them in The Blood Miles and had a lot of fun doing it. The Bible Is Chock Full of Easter Eggs The Bible is chock full of Easter eggs too. Alongside the explicit…
The Storied World: Impassibility, Incarnation & Virtual Reality
In recent months, I have been thinking and writing about the significance of stories, divine impassibility and the incarnation. Here is a post to draw some of those threads together in the light of our Christmas hope. Some of this is an adaptation of a paper I gave up at EV church earlier this month. Here’s an odd truth to…
Introducing The Blood Miles
‘The Blood Miles’ is about how it feels to live in a world that is at war with its true Ruler. It is about pressing on when progress seems slow, when failures abound, and when help seems so far away.
Spooky Stories and the Lord of Halloween
I like a spooky story. Maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe it’s unhealthy. Maybe I should be more reformed and less medieval—more Zwingli and less Luther, as Carl Trueman would put it. I know there are definite dangers in thinking too much about spooky things—of drifting into a superstitious mindset where intermediate powers control the ups and downs of life. I know…
The Blood Miles: Chapter 1
We meet Chris Walker, occasional gravedigger and town sniper as he defends the fortress town of Spillan from wasteland marauders. This excerpt from The Blood Miles is provided by Brightmettle Audio. To find out more about the book, visit thebloodmiles.com.
Narnia Must Die – Tough Questions for Christian Writers
A few weeks ago, I shared some of my thoughts about the possibilities of Christian fiction: whether it should exist; what it might achieve. I ended on a fairly upbeat note. Stories might refresh our jaded palettes to see what’s true; stories might take us by surprise and sneak past our prejudices and certainties. But there is one important problem…
Considering Barbie (and Marriage and Singleness)
Being human can be very uncomfortable … People make up things like the patriarchy and Barbie to endure how uncomfortable it is. Jen and I saw Barbie over the weekend. We both liked it; were both surprised by it. I thought it was funny and smart and multi-layered to a degree that I still haven’t fathomed. The film’s reframing of…
What’s the Point of Christian Fiction?
What’s the point of Christian fiction? Can it do any good? Should it even exist? These are some of the questions I have been mulling over as I have been working on several novels over the last ten (or thirty) years or so. I have found them difficult to answer, but here are some scattered ideas that I have tried…
The Little Hunter Who Ran on Water
One of the projects I am currently working on has required me to generate several background myth-cycles. Here is a story from one of those mythologies. In the larger novel it appears as a tale from a children’s book called, “Tales From Lands Afar”. Perceptive readers might recognise allusions to several other stories from the real world within it. Here…
Medieval Bikkies for Jen
Back in June 2021, I made some bikkies for Jen’s birthday. I wanted to copy Dr Ella Hawkins’ amazing and painstakingly hand-painted masterpieces but I didn’t have the skill / patience / time / eyesight. Fortunately, I do have a bit of technical cunning, so I found a whole lot of images of illuminated manuscripts online, cropped and imposed them…
