T.R. Napper's Blog

Hit my target of 52 books read for the year. You know what? I love reading. Completely trite to say so, but there it is. Several times throughout 2025, while I was lying on my couch (a battered yet fiendishly comfortable decades-old from my student years) I would rest the book on my chest and think: this is the life.

I treat reading as part of my job as a writer – and financial penury aside – I’m truly fortunate to be a part of this profession.

Over the past few years I’ve ...

This year, Ghost of the Neon God won both Best Science Fiction Novella at the Aurealis Awards, and Best Novella at the Ditmars. The Aurealis is a juried award, and genuinely features the best of Australian SF. The Ditmars is by popular vote – and while these types of awards can be flawed – nonetheless reflects the acclaim of the local fan community.

Here’s the thing: it’s super rare to win both (I looked back over the last twenty 20 years and found perhaps four other examples). To do so means yo...

Art is not a luxury, it is a necessity. Let me show you why.

I write full time, which is another way of saying I’m broke. As such, I work several extra jobs (three, currently) to feed my writing habit. I’m lucky, insofar as most of those jobs are as a creative writing mentor, and I’ve always enjoyed teaching. I’m particularly fortunate to have one of those mentor positions with a program called ARRTS (Art for Recovery, Resilience, Teamwork and Skills).

I recently watched a thoughtful, interesting YouTube on ‘Writing Characters Who Are Weapons,’ by Tim Hickson. He’s a New Zealander who runs the channel HelloFutureMe, which deals with both writing as a craft and analysing pop culture. He’s got some great content, so I recommend you go and check it out. I’ve embedded the video in this article because he includes as one of his examples Lin Thi Vu from 36 Streets (2022), and The Escher Man (2024), which in turn compels my ego to share it with you.[image error]

Ditmar Awards Voting is open. For the uninitiated, the Ditmars are the annual Australian peer-voted awards for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror.

What does peer-voted mean? Well, that you are either attending the National Convention (or have in recent years) or that you are ‘active in fandom’. What does the latter mean?[image error]

As I understand it: if you’ve been to a convention in Australia, or are in a discussion group (online or live), or interact regularly on social media, or are simply a fan of A...

I recently did an interview with Jonathan, an Australian BookTuber who runs a channel called Words in Time. He’s got some great content, so I recommend you go and check it out. I’ve embedded the interview in this article, and below it have added the notes I made before we talked (re-written into article form). The notes expand somewhat on the discussion in some cases, and in others make observations we didn’t have time for. Though they obviously don’t capture the back-and-forth and digressions (...

Australia’s premier award for speculative fiction is the Aurealis. It is a juried award, and genuinely features the best of Australian SF. I get anxious every year in the lead up to the short list announcement, elated if I make the cut, and more anxious still in the days before the ceremony.

So it was a huge honour for me to win the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novella this year, for Ghost of the Neon God. The book was a fix up of sorts, taking several years on and off (I discuss the ...

Introduction

Discussion of Artificial Intelligence by the tech industry is equal parts dishonest and stupid. It is a discussion founded on the invidious lies of the snake oil salesman conjoined with the religious-like fervour of the fundamentalist.

Indeed, the cult of the techbro sees the singularity as god, the uploaded consciousness as the gift of eternal life, and the arrival of Artificial General Intelligence as ushering in heaven on earth: a post-scarcity era where every being gets everythi...

Hit my target of 52 books read for the year. As I keep saying (because it’s true) reading is part of the job of a writer. I put aside a couple of hours every evening to do so. When I do this, and especially when the book is good, I can feel the changes in my brain. It becomes calmer, more thoughtful and focussed, and seeks immersion in imagined worlds.

This is a phenomenon dealt with by Maryanne Wolf in ‘Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World.’ In essence, the digital brain – di...

“I think a writer’s notebook is the best way in the world to immortalise bad ideas. My idea about a good idea is one that sticks around and sticks around.”

Terrible advice, for one simple reason: none of the rest of us are Stephen King. He’s written around 70 books. He writes and writes and writes. Squashed by a fucken van, six weeks in hospital,[image error] dusts himself off, keeps writing. Apparently sits down and churns out 6 pages (1500 words) a day, every day, no ...