I’m Ray Newman, a writer, editor and content designer based in Bristol.
My crime novel The Grave Digger’s Boy was published in 2019 and my short ghost stories are collected in Municipal Gothic and Intervals of Darkness.
I post on my blog my fairly regularly. Recent posts are below or you can check out the whole back catalogue.
Recent posts
7: The Dead Spot – Thin Places in Hard Concrete, story by story
The seventh story in my new collection, Thin Places in Hard Concrete, is just as long as it needs to be. Which is another way of saying it’s very short – just shy of a thousand words. I’ve mentioned before how inspiring I found ‘24 Rules for Writing Short Stories’ by Owen Booth. There’s plenty…
Mozart in mirrorshades, Bach to the future
What was going on in the 1970s and 80s that Bach and Mozart became tangled up with technology and science fiction? I’ve got a theory. A key text in all of this is the 1985 cyberpunk story ‘Mozart in Mirrorshades’ by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner, available in the genre-defining anthology Mirrorshades from 1986. Originally…
6: The Presence Chamber – Thin Places in Hard Concrete, story by story
The sixth story in my new collection, Thin Places in Hard Concrete, was inspired by reading about Henry VIII’s colossal Nonsuch Palace. I first learned about Nonsuch from the 1945 book British Architects and Craftsmen by Sacheverell Sitwell, which I read in a yellowing Pan paperback edition from 1960. A chapter about Tudor architecture includes…
Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart 