Good Monday morning. The sun is shining and we’re back from a much needed family holiday – our first break of the year thanks to inconvenient overlaps of my work, husband’s work and sons’ school/college timetables making any kind of getaway before now impossible. It was a good holiday – of which more later. First I really had better tackle the email and post that’s arrived in our absence.

Happily I can take my own time doing that. I delivered the final draft of Defiant Peaks, aka The Hadrumal Crisis Book 3, to my editor at Solaris the day before we went away. I await his verdict with interest. Meantime I have some short story commissions to drag forward from the back burner where they’ve been simmering for the last few months. One SF, one fantasy and one… somewhere in between.

I am also idly contemplating a few Einarinn short stories – specifically detailing events/episodes which I refer to in Defiant Peaks but where I had to resist the temptation to include them in full. Doing so would have significantly delayed and/or distracted from the main narrative thread and besides the points of view would have been all wrong. We’ll see – maybe early next year, if I can work out how to write them without being too spoilery for the novel itself.

One other thing I did just before we went away was have a chat with Sandy Auden about Defiant Peaks and that’s the basis of this interview with SFX which will hopefully whet appetites from Defiant Peaks.

Next novel project? Nothing to announce as yet – I’m having a few conversations with a few people and we shall see what we shall see.

Right, I had better get on with that email and post then.

Life continues busy… Congenial in Cambridge was indeed splendid fun and this weekend I am off to the annual St Hilda’s Crime & Mystery Weekend in Oxford, to enjoy erudite papers and genial discussion, this year considering humour in crime fiction. And yes, obviously, when I put these things in the diary, the firm intention was to have delivered Defiant Peaks before now. Ho hum. Last lap starts Monday and at least I’m on track to deliver it without pulling any all-nighters. A few late nights, perhaps, but it’s been that sort of year.

Meantime, you may be interested in a piece I wrote for Erin Pringle, an American writer I met at the Phoenix Convention in Dublin the year before last. A very nice lady and a very talented and interesting writer as you will discover at her website/

She’s hosting a summer series of articles where various writers from the US and the British Isles are reflecting on our relationships with libraries. They make fascinating reading and my piece is now live, something of a memoir about my local branch library when I was a kid in Poole, Dorset.

Enjoy!

So if Darkening Skies, the second book of The Hadrumal Crisis trilogy is published in the US on 28th February and in the UK on the 1st of March, what happens on this leap year day of 29th February?

Well, for a start, you can go and read the opening chapter, wherever you might be, over on the Solaris Editors’ Blog.

I’ve also done an interview with the Solaris chaps talking about this book and trilogy as well as what I write and read more generally. There’ll be a few more guest blog spots here and there over the next week or so as well.

In addition, I’m celebrating along with the fabulous and talented CE Murphy, whose new book Raven Calls is also published this week, with a joint launch party at the Irish Writers Centre, Parnell Square, Dublin on Friday evening, by way of kicking off the fun at P-Con IX where I’ll be spending my weekend along with an array of great writers, great fans and many good friends. I’ll be discussing issues of gender in writing and publishing, internet piracy and the erosion of writers’ rights, and running a writers workshop alongside George Green of Lancaster Uni. By way of lighter topics, a group of us will be tackling ‘I didn’t get a letter from Hogwarts so I left the Shire to become a Vampire Jedi: how do authors avoid writing this book?’

Next week, when life calms down a bit, I’ll see about a book giveaway competition. Why so busy? Well, apart from the above, I’ve been working on a redesign of my website, which will see a whole new blog-based set-up, with a fair bit of additional background material about my writing added to what’s already been available, along with my articles, review, diary and other such stuff. At that point, this interim blog will go into mothballs.

I am indebted to Cheryl Morgan for all her help with this website relaunch, at the same time as she’s been tackling the publication angles for the forthcoming Further Tales of Einarinn ebook. There’s just a few final t’s to be crossed there and that’ll be available soon. Then we finalise an ebook of Turns & Chances, the Lescari Revolution novella. Meantime, of course, the Lescari Chronicles and both of the Hadrumal books to date are available in the eformat of your choice from your preferred supplier.

Right, I had better get back to finalising an Einarinn Gazetteer for the new site…

… after I’ve admired Clint Langley’s fantastic artwork for Darkening Skies one more time…

For more insights into the writerly life, or at least my part of it, check out this interview with Bob Neilson of Albedo One posing the questions. He plans on making this a series of interviews, so make sure you bookmark the page.

Then there’s Dolly Garland’s Bookshelf Snooping over on Writer Revealed, where you’ll find a varied selection of writers sharing their book memories and current enthusiasms -er, mostly at more length than me, I now see.

right, back to work here!

There’s a new interview with me now available at The Zone an SF, Fantasy, Horror and Mystery site well worth a visit and a browse for news, reviews and interviews.

Jim Steel of Interzone was asking the questions and very interesting they were, including some I’ve not been asked or even thought about before, Enjoy!