Hello.

Gosh, has it really been ten years since I launched my blog?

And what a decade it's been. Why, when it started I knew nothing of folk music, Barak Obama, or David Cameron. Doctor Who was still off-air, we were hoping that George Lucas might pull everything together in the final movie and we thought that there was a good chance that the Narnia movies wouldn't suck. I still worked in the games industry and there was no such thing as Twitter.

Well, we're now all very old and very disillusioned, and I am still hammering out words in my spare time (having intermittently been paid for doing so by magazines like Arcane and Sci-Fi Now. Did I mention I met Tom Baker?) I have published a shelf full of books based on my on-line writing. Some people have actually been quite nice about them. In 2014 I launched my collected Doctor Who essays as a huge book on Kickstarter and was bowled over and embarrassed by the support I got.

But I think I have to accept that selling physical copies of books is increasingly no longer where it's at and that if I am going to carry on being a semi-professional writer I am going to have to ask my...er....fans to semi-pay me for the blog itself.

If they want to, obviously.

If you like my writing, and want me to continue doing it and living the lifestyle to which I am accustomed, please, please, please consider making a pledge to pay me a small sum of money ($1 is traditional, or about 69p in earth money) each time I publish an essay or article. On average, I publish about one article a week, so if you backed me for $1 you'd get charged $4 (around £2.80) at the end of the month. You can put a cap on it if you are worried about me writing 200 essays and bankrupting you.

Everything that would have gone on the blog will still go on the blog -- you can carry on reading me for free if you want -- but if you find me interesting and want to encourage and support me then please consider clicking the button and becoming a patreon.