Forgot to post last week. No excuse other than being busy working on CONSORTS. I’ve developed an odd attitude to writing, though I suspect it’s quite normal once you start actually getting paid for doing something you’ve previously treated as a cross between a secret love and OCD. Now I feel guilty when I’m not […]

I’ve recently put another two stories up on the excellent site www.anthologybuilder.com. This service lets writers keep previously published stories ‘live’ and allows readers to create their own bespoke print-on-demand anthologies for a relatively small outlay (assuming you have the means to lay out in dollars). The first story, which appeared in a (now defunct) […]

I’ve just had confirmation that I’ll be doing (at least one) signing for PRINCIPLES OF ANGELS. Anyone who lives in (or wants to travel to) my neck of the woods would be most welcome to come to the Little Green Dragon bookshop, at the top of the High Street in Alton, Hampshire on Saturday 28th […]

Our break started with fellow Gollancz author Alex Bell’s small but perfectly formed launch party for her first novel, The Ninth Circle. As well as fine food, fine wine and fine company, this featured the largest chocolate fountain I’ve ever seen. Then off, happy but slightly hung-over, to Wales. Portmeirion was as marvellous as ever.  […]

I’ve now reached the ‘Aha, so it is SF after all’ stage of Consorts of Heaven.  Actually I’m hoping the reader will have spotted it’s SF long before this, even if the truth still isn’t yet obvious to most of the characters. Although I am an SF writer (despite being dubbed one of the ‘Three […]

I’ve been about three quarters of the way through the ‘Consorts’ rewrites all this week. That’s not to say I haven’t been working hard – I’ve (re)written the best part of four chapters over the last five days. However, I’m now reaching some of the more hastily written sections, which I’ve had to re-think drastically. […]

I’ve got to a (relatively) easy bit in ‘Consorts’. Stuff is happening and the characters are reacting – there’s not many ways things can go. As a result, I’ve not done much actual re-writing, more just tightening things up. By next week they’ll be making rods for their own backs again, which is more work […]

I got the page proofs for ‘Principles of Angels’ back to Gollancz in time, despite the best efforts of the Royal Mail. (Note to lazy eejit in central London sorting office: your cunning plan to claim that the recipient of the Special Delivery ‘before 1pm’ was out in order to save actually delivering the parcel […]

Well, I survived Eastercon, even if my voice didn’t. Amongst many other firsts at the con (being interviewed, being hypnotised, being sober quite a lot of the time), I did my first non-verbal program item, due to a bout of laryngitis. Green Room came up trumps and made me cue cards for the ‘Sex and […]

This time tomorrow I should be at Eastercon, on one of my first panels as a ‘pro’. I’m a bit ambivalent about this, for a number of reasons. Firstly, though I (or rather my hard-drinking, role-playing, costume-wearing alter ego JW) went to a lot of cons back in the mists of the last century, I’ve […]