A blog by Seán Padraic Birnie

Seán Padraic Birnie

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Latest — 03 Jan 2026

A judgement & a curse

I awoke this morning to the news that the US had invaded Venezuela and abducted President Maduro. This was just going to be a brief Happy New Year post, and a placeholder post, pending a longer post at some point this month. But it feels weird to start with that

More issues

October '25: 'Something New'

This October blogpost brings with it a previously unpublished short story, 'Something New', embedded in the body text below and downloadable at the bottom of the post as .epub and .kepub files, as well as some thoughts on the story and whether it borrows a little too much

September 2025: ‘Heavyness’ & a REMAINS magazine discount code

I was very pleased when Andy Cox and Richard Wagner returned to publishing this year with REMAINS, following Andy's retirement in 2024 and the shuttering of TTA Press, longtime stalwart of genre short fiction publishing in the UK. I first came across TTA’s horror mag BLACK STATIC

A ladder, a hammer, a husk, a game: 34 ways of looking at ‘genre'

1. Genre as a commercial taxonomy that tells you, the consumer, where the commodity you seek is located in the shop. 2. Genre as the husk or exuvia innovation leaves behind. 3. Genre as scaffolding, or as the ladder one throws away once one has climbed it, see 2. 4.

July 2025

I. Dream sequence II. An update from the sick room III. Some stories recently enjoyed IV. Some new publications VI. Heads or tails I. Dream sequence On the hospital corridor, in the dead hours, sleepless fathers-to-be nod to one another at the tea and coffee station. The coffee was awful

Come on now

Hello. My plan, such as it is, is to post about reading and writing and other things that take my interest, on a roughly monthly basis. This may include photography, horror, psychoanalysis, updates on my own publications, and chronic illness. The last of these – I have M.E. – has derailed