Books, The Guardian And More Damned Chickens

Spent not nearly enough time today thinking up ideas for a new book proposal for Tor, which has the working title - and it really is a working title - The Array. I've got the backstory, and now I'm trying to develop the characters. It's always a bit of a frustrating process, but in the next few days or weeks I'll come up with something; the waiting around until the ideas arrive is the only bit I don't like. I very much suspect this one is going to be a one-off, rather than another trilogy or series - though to be honest, if I can come up with something good enough, I'd be thrilled to write another multi-part story. There's also a notion for something else coming together in my mind that might work in the Stealing Light universe, though it would be unrelated to the events in the three I've written so far.

I was pleasantly surprised when an email arrived from Pan Macmillan with a link to this article in The Guardian, wherein I'm described by Stuart Jeffries as being amongst the 'heroes' of what he calls a new golden age of British science fiction. I'm thoroughly tickled, as I'm sure are Mike Cobley, Liz Williams, Ken McLeod and the several other writers mentioned in the piece.

At first I thought this was the reason for a sudden big jump in hits on this blog, but instead it turned out to be those damn evil chickens I blogged about a few weeks ago. The increasingly sf and fantasy-friendly Guardian has started a new blog covering past winners of the British Fantasy Awards, beginning with Moorcock's 'Corum' novels (although I'm a big fan of Moorcock where the Jerry Cornelius books are concerned, I'll admit I never read any of his sword-and-sorcery novels; there's nothing wrong with them, they're just really not my kind of thing). Reference and a link is provided referring to Terry Goodkind's 'evil chickens' passage , but it wasn't until I did a bit of online research that I realised the article was in fact linking to me. Props really should go to the chap who mentioned the chickens in the first place, in the comments of one of The Guardian's other articles.

What else? I'm redesigning the blog. Probably. Well, I've already done it - minus some tweaks - but it won't go live for a few days or weeks yet, or at least not until I've tried it out on one or two people first. I'll also have to set up an excerpt from Nova War sometime soon.

Rough artwork for Empire of Light came through the other day - two pieces, both of which look absolutely brilliant, but one of which not only looks great but stands out to me as something that should be on the cover. Hopefully Pan M. will agree with me. It really does look quite amazing. As soon as something's finished or approved or whatever, you'll be seeing it (or whatever Pan decide on) here, probably sometime in the next couple of weeks.