i have a holiday

Before I say anything else, possibly the most fun way of completely wasting your time and not actually getting any work done this month is the 'simpsonize me' function at the promo web page for the Simpsons movie. I think this looks like me ... but I might try uploading another picture and see if it looks pretty much the same or different. I say this with the full knowledge I am almost certainly the last person in the universe to have become aware of this.

I finally booked myself a holiday for a couple of weeks, staying with a friend really quite a long way away (the 'better offer' I mentioned a few entries before) for a really depressingly large sum of money, but, like I say, I need the break. I won't say where just yet - I think it's more fun if I just maybe write a couple of blog entries once I'm there. I'm hoping I can keep writing and working on the book while I'm away, so I'm taking the laptop. I'm not leaving for a while though - I'll be away on a big jet plane from early October to the end of the month, so three weeks in total. That's just after the new book comes out, and between now and then I have to sign a shitload of bookplates for Forbidden Planet and the other main bookstores as well. Assuming, that is, the damn things actually turn up in the post; Tor have tried to send them to me twice in the past couple of weeks, and no sign of them ... yet. This, despite a trip down to the sorting office. Maybe it's a backlog after the recent strikes, but I don't know. I feel like I've been lucky that whenever Tor have posted me a marked-up manuscript for correction, it hasn't so far got lost in the post. If that ever did happen, I could see it causing major delays in publication (whenever I send them or my agent something, it always - always - goes recorded delivery).

I just spent the weekend in Dundee with a couple of friends (I don't think I've been there before), just for the sake of the change as much as anything else. Apart from that, work is moving ahead on the book front, which is good. There are some changes where the day job is concerned, but that's a whole saga in itself. More on that later, assuming it doesn't get turned into a Christopher Brookmyre novel between now and then ...