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.