Essays

Simon is a regular speaker at the Greenbelt Arts Festival, held every August Bank holiday weekend at Cheltenham racecourse. Seven of these talks are now online, along with the foreword to a short story anthology.

Foreword to Leaps of Faith – a foreword to a religious-themed anthology of science fiction short stories, first published in ebook format in 2004, and as a paperback with this foreword in 2008.

A thousand points of light – a talk about the Inklings and what we can learn from them about writing groups, from Greenbelt 2008

What makes a good story? – a talk about having to read nearly fifty novels in three months and what you can learn from that, from Greenbelt 2006

How to read Science Fiction – a talk for non-sf readers extolling the joys of all things spaceshippy, from Greenbelt 2006

Sex, Death and Christian Fiction – a polemic on the state of Christian fiction, from Greenbelt 2005

Where are we now? Sex, Death and Christian Fiction revisited – unsurprisingly, revisiting the ground (in 2011) from the 2005 talk to see if anything’s changed. A chance to get cross all over again!

You’re doing it wrong: how not to write a novel – a 2011 workshop on, well, not writing a novel. The workshop where we packed the venue to over-capacity and over-ran wildly. Oops.

Money flows to the author: making books pay in the 21st century – 2012′s Greenbelt offering, discussing the ebook revolution, Amazon and piracy. Amongst other things.