Gwyneth Jones' guest of honour talk from Beneluxcon, March 2012:

I was asked for a short piece of writing, to feature in your first Progress Report. By chance, the short pieces that came to hand seemed to define an area of interest, a misty place where dreams, science fiction and classic horror meet. Since nobody threw them back, I decided to make that shadowy place my theme for this talk. So, this item has been governed by chance: but that's okay. Some people complain about the huge role random coincidence plays in weird tales, as if the writers were just lazy, but to the initiated, the fact that there's no reason on earth why fearful uncanny events should happen to the characters in the story is part of their awful charm... Anyway, I'm going to talk about ghosts, how I first met them, where they led me; and what I think about all that spooky stuff.

Some related reading on Jones' blog. Elsewhere, Martin Lewis has read Jones' most recent novel, Spirit, and is excited by it: "Spirit contains more in a single book than most modern science fiction trilogies manage and is easily one of the half dozen best SF novels published this century."