What I want for christmas

I've played guitar for more than twenty years, on and off, and this thing is a fricking delight (link). There's a video on the website, to my recollection. Not cheap at four grand, but there's a mini version for £350.

Dear Gods of Publishing

Dear Gods of Publishing: I know you feel the need to put me in my place every time I reach some new summit in my writing career, but could you try harder not to have my boiler explode so that I need to get it replaced at extraordinary cost every single time? K thanks.

Book offer

I just got an offer for Tor for three new books, starting with Final Days, which I've blogged about in the past. The other two books are a sequel to Final Days, called The Thousand Emperors, and Core (very much a working title), a standalone story set in the same world as Stealing Light and its sequels. Off to a restaurant to celebrate.

Interview at Amazon UK

There's an interview with me over at Amazon.co.uk's 'Author Spotlight at the moment, if you fancy checking it out.

My publishing experiment, continued

Several days ago, I wrote about an excellent unpublished novel by a writer I've known for nearly twenty years. Fergus Bannon finished his book just in time for real life to scupper any serious attempts at placing it with either an agent or a publisher. As a result it wound up forgotten in a drawer for a long, long time until I asked to see it. I liked it so much I was determined that it shouldn't simply vanish. And since Fergus has zero time or opportunity to do anything about it, I volunteered to try and get it out there in some way.

Well, you can buy it now, from the online publishing site Smashwords, as an ebook in a wide variety of formats for the price of $2.00. It's been raved about by Neil Williamson and Jim Steel, both of them frequent contributors to Interzone, here and here.

Free copies of the ebook go to anyone who has a blog, website or twitter account and is willing to give the book some kind of review or mention: to this end, either email me (gary at garygibson dot net) or leave contact details in the comments for this entry and I'll send you a code you can use to download the book from Smashwords for free. Otherwise, you can download and read the first 50% of the book for free, or read it online here.

The blurb: 'It started with a few isolated incidents. A mob shootout in Las Vegas, a firefight in the Central American jungles - one apparently unconnected event after the other, hinting at a worldwide conspiracy of unprecedented proportions. But before long CIA computer specialist Bob Leith realises it's something much more than mere globalised terrorism, something literally not of this world ...'