Notes From the Writing Shed

Every story I write begins as a poem.
I'm not sure when I started doing this, but somewhere along the way it became part of how I write. Before I worry about characters, plot, dialogue or even where the story takes place, I write a poem.
It's my way of finding out what the story is really about. Not what happens in it, but what lies underneath: the theme, the feeling, the thing that makes me want to tell it at all. I suppose I'm trying to find the story's soul before I give it a body.
Take "A...

Some of the Monsters Live Up the Road

Irish Folklore Survived Because We Kept Changing It

J.M. Lane

I bastardised Irish mythology. Lovingly.

In the Raven Chronicles, my fantasy trilogy, I took Setanta, the childhood name of Cú Chulainn, and gave it to a fictional son of Cú Chulainn and the Morrígan. I moved stories around, mixed folklore from different places and periods and invented things completely. It was either a continuation of the tradition or an act of cultural vandalism. For a while, I...

I’m back in hospital for surgery connected to the removal of my kidney two years ago because of cancer. Not exactly where I’d planned to be, but I’m still here, still writing, and still looking forward.

There was some good news in among it all. My poem “Samhain Harvest” made the longlist for the Frances Browne Poetry Competition 2026. Sadly, it didn’t make the shortlist, but I’m genuinely delighted it got that far.

And, all going well with recovery, I’ll be in Castlebar on 10 October for the ...

I’m delighted to say that I’ll be appearing at the Wild Atlantic Words Literary Festival in Castlebar this October, where I’ll be reading one of my short stories as a finalist in this year’s Wild Atlantic Words Short Story Competition.

The competition was judged this year by Colin Barrett, which makes reaching the final particularly special for me. Barrett grew up in County Mayo and has become one of the most recognised contemporary Irish short story writers. His debut collection, Young Skins,...

I've been working on an idea for a new project, bringing my poetry together with original music to create a series of soundscapes.

The idea is simple. I'll record myself reading my poems and invite musicians and composers to create original music around them.

Poetry means different things to different people. A poem might bring a particular memory, image or feeling to one person and something entirely different to another. I want to give other artists the freedom to explore the ideas and...

I'm delighted to announce that my new novel, Why the Curlew Cries, is coming this October.

Set in the northwest of Ireland, where quiet country roads wind through isolated hills and everyone seems to know everyone else's business, this is a crime novel inspired by true crimes and the darker side of rural life.

At the heart of the story is Jack Dawson, a former Garda turned private investigator, a man carrying his own losses who finds himself drawn into a case that will take him into some very...

The Women Who Vanished

The Modern Shadow Behind Why the Curlew Cries

Part Two: The Cases That Refused to Go Away

In Part One, I wrote about Bridget Cleary.
A young woman killed in Tipperary in 1895 because the people around her came to believe that she had been taken by the fairies and replaced with something else.
That story gave Why the Curlew Cries some of its older darkness. Folklore, isolation, strange beliefs surviving beside modern life.
But there is another shadow behind the book.

And this...

Part One: The Woman the Fairies Took

There is a phrase I have been careful with when talking about my forthcoming novel, Why the Curlew Cries.

Inspired by true events.
Not based on a true story. There is a difference.

Jack Dawson is fictional. So are Gerry, Angela and the people Jack encounters as he follows the case his dead partner left behind. But fiction does not grow in a vacuum, and there are real pieces of Irish history sitting underneath this book.
Some of them are surprisingly recent....

Ring of Culture Turns One, and Writers Should Take Notice

There are never enough places for writers to put their work. Not just places to submit it, but places genuinely interested in giving new and emerging writers a chance to be read, heard and talked about.

That is why I wanted to give a quick mention to Ring of Culture, which celebrates its first birthday tonight.
Founded by author and publisher Vítor Vicente, Ring of Culture has grown into a cultural platform covering books, publishing,...

Knowledge Is Only Powerful When We Share It

I’ve been working on a new series of articles that will be appearing on Writing.ie, and the idea behind them is actually very simple.

I don’t believe in holding on to knowledge.

We hear the phrase knowledge is power all the time, but I’m not sure I completely agree with it. Knowledge sitting in someone’s head, or hidden behind a locked door, isn’t particularly powerful.

The power is in sharing it.

One of the things I have noticed since becoming more...

I have a new article up with Books Ireland looking at something that has bothered me for a while: the point where being published starts to feel a little too much like being sold to.

Writers are used to submitting work without any guarantee of payment. That comes with the territory, particularly with smaller magazines and anthologies. What interests me is what happens afterwards, when the contributor is then encouraged to buy the publication containing their own work.

There is nothing...

Who’s There? is the first directing work from Irish writer J.M. Lane, a short horror film made with almost nothing except a small room, a phone and the idea that sometimes what you cannot see is far worse than what you can.

Running at under four minutes, the film follows a terrified man who rushes into a confined room and hides from something outside. The camera never moves. Whatever is hunting him remains largely unseen, and as the film develops another possibility begins to creep in: perhaps...

The Gardener

When Martin Byrne came down from Dublin, the people in Glenamaddy all thought he
was a poor example of a man, and the poor fella should be left alone. That was how
they said it, even to Martin himself.
“Ah, poor lad.”
He was not poor in money. Martin had always had plenty of money and had bought the
old Burke place in Glenamaddy outright, along with a new jeep with Dublin plates and
leather seats.
Poor they meant in the other way, the more meaningful poor. The way a man is poor
when...

I have always liked stories in whatever form they come.

Books obviously, but also paintings, podcasts , film, photography amd more than anything somebody sitting at a table telling you something that happened to them thirty years ago or thirty seconds ago.

Recently I decided to try telling one through film. Not in any grand way. I had a phone, a tiny space, myself and an idea for a short horror film called Whose There?

That was pretty much the production budget.

There was o crew or fancy camera....

The past few months have not gone as I expected.

As many of you already know, I have had to delay the release of Why the Curlew Cries. The novel itself is complete, but the final polishing has taken longer than planned because life demanded my attention elsewhere.

Through all of that, my ARC readers and subscribers have continued to support me. You signed up to read this book, waited patiently for updates and offered kindness when I needed it most. I do not take that patience for granted.

So, as...

A Difficult but Necessary Delay for Why the Curlew Cries

I am deeply disappointed to announce that I have had to delay the release of my new novel, Why the Curlew Cries.

The book follows Jack Dawson, a former Garda carrying injuries of both body and mind, as he is drawn into the disappearance of several women in the isolated countryside of County Sligo. What begins as a favour for an old friend leads him towards a remote farm, a family fractured by secrets, and a truth buried far deeper than...

I had not expected choosing a cover for Why the Curlew Cries to be so difficult.
By the time a manuscript reaches this stage, you know the story intimately. You know its silences, its hidden wounds and the places where darkness gathers. Then you are asked to reduce all of that to a single image.
The cover needed to capture the isolation of the Ox Mountains, the beauty of rural Ireland and the uneasy feeling that something terrible may be happening just beyond sight. It had to feel literary...

I am currently putting the final polish on my first full-length novel, Why the Curlew Cries, and I have discovered that finishing a book can be almost as difficult as beginning one.
These final days are strange.
The story is written. The characters have lived through everything I asked of them. The secrets have been uncovered, the wounds have been opened, and the final page is waiting. Yet the manuscript still refuses to feel entirely finished.
There is always another sentence that catches at...

The wait is nearly over.
On March 30th, the next chapter in the bestselling, award-winning Raven Chronicles arrives on Kindle, with the paperback landing April 1st—and this time, the story does not hold back.
Setanta is no longer the boy who stood at the water’s edge. The world has opened, and what waits within it is older, darker, and far more violent. Villages fall silent. The land itself feels wrong. And at the centre of it all is a name whispered in fear—the Blood King.
This is a story of...