Bytown
Maggie Kelly wanted a quiet life. In an unruly canal town, even that may be too much to ask.
The body of work
Projects
I've decided to stop classifying my work in terms of format, and instead just call it all "webfiction", as god intended. So here, more or less, is my creative output over the last twenty-some years. It will grow and evolve over time, so don't assume that just because you've read something, that you've read it all. There's always something new to see.
The enduring work
Stories and worlds
One entry per underlying project. Individual books and earlier forms remain inside their histories.
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Dustrunners
Illegal asteroid mining, dangerous pilots and the people caught between governments, corporations and orbit.
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Lennie Carson
A sharp-tongued young sleuth in 1920s Chicago, solving other people’s problems while complicating her own.
Earlier forms -
The New Real
Intergalactic drug enforcement, a disgraced human recruit and a cast that became stranger as the story grew.
Earlier forms -
The SteamDuck Chronicles
A talking duck, a telekinetic fish and an increasingly indefensible tour through an alternate nineteenth century.
Earlier forms -
Arkady and Kain
A counterspy, a young terrorist and the consequences that keep turning every choice into another one.
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Oki and Nobbin
A mercenary with an impossible debt helps a free-spirited prince search for his missing planet.
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TorrentBoy
A kid with a talking watch, a teddy bear with a laser blaster, and a world bible anyone was invited to write in.
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The Vector
A painter, a homemade plague and a city discovering that the apocalypse may be personal.
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The Archivists
A novel written live in a Belgian café, with the audience and the machinery visible around it.
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Cutest Little Thing
An adorable toy escapes its box and begins hunting everyone unfortunate enough to admire it.
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The Pig and the Box
An internet-age fable about a magic copying box, limitless possibility and the importance of sharing.
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Panda Apples
Every snack-time disaster brings Owen one step closer to a life of lima beans and smelly eggplants.
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Percy’s Perch
A little gargoyle afraid of heights and a bullied boy learn to face their fears one step at a time.
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The Threader in Autumn
A magician who can twist fate faces a routine contract that may unleash an ancient evil.
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Xander and the Wind
A boy whose balloons, umbrellas and soap bubbles all lose their battles with the weather.
From the archive
Experiments and oddities
Work where the mechanism was part of the point: live audiences, timed messages and stories that changed under their readers.
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The Anti-Anti-Anti-Christs
A story whose readers named the characters and chose their pronouns before the first line appeared.
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Dirt
A mystery performed through timed messages, emails and photographs inside a fictional evidence app.
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Fission Chips
A serial whose readers voted at the end of every chapter and made the consequences progressively stranger.
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The Scarlet Lemming
A Richardson and Marx mystery written in public over five days, with the audience feeding the chaos.
For the record
TV and film
Animation writing across series and specials, rather than work owned or sold here.
11 screen credits
These credits belong in the creative record, but their characters and worlds belong to the studios. They are not products on this shelf and cannot be released into the Commons.