I’m thrilled with the design and layout, and I’m hoping that from now on there’ll be a lot more bloggery and interactive back-and-forth commentary-type doings than in previous times.  Please feel free to explore, browse, and share any thoughts you might have.  2010 is going to be a big and busy year for me, and here’s the forum where I’ll be taking you through it and you’ll be helping me along.

The sale of Solaris Books has finally gone through, hurrah, and the new owners are Rebellion Publishing; go check out the formal announcement. I’ve briefly been in charge with Rebel Leader Jon Oliver, discussing cover design for The Age Of Zeus, so it seems, encouragingly, that the baton has already been picked up and is being run with. As for Zeus itself, it’s turning into a bit of a behemoth, but in a good way, with gore and gunplay aplenty. I hope to have the MS done and delivered by November.

Review quotes for Ra are now available in the Books section. The cheerleaders are all going ra ra ra!

Here’s the state of play with regard to The Age Of Ra. Publication is but a fortnight away, and two glowing write-ups have already appeared. There’s one in Publisher’s Weekly; you have to scroll down a bit, but it’s there, and it’s starred, no less. Then there’s this one at Fantasy Book Critic, a real humdinger from a chap called Liviu Suciu.

The bummer about all this, the negative to the positive, the yang to the yin, the Torchwood to the New Who, is the fact that Solaris itself is in a state of limbo. The imprint, as I’m sure you’re aware, is in the process of being sold, and a buyer is lined up and raring to go (I know who it is but I’m not at liberty to say). Everything was meant to be done and dusted at least two months ago, and would be sorted by now had various agents and lawyers not got involved and caused endless delays with their finagling and nitpicking and general agenty lawyerness. As a result, the fine fellows at Solaris — George, Christian and Mark — have all headed off for employment elsewhere and the imprint is, while still nominally under their control, more or less rudderless. Meaning Ra isn’t getting the promotional push it would otherwise have got. Curse those agents and lawyers. F***ing w***ers. And that’s swearing.

But the book is getting out there, and more reviews will be forthcoming, I’m sure of it.

I very much enjoyed the signing at Forbidden Planet last week. Lots of people came to see Mark Chadbourn, and why wouldn’t they? He’s very handsome and a fine author to boot. But a few came to see me as well, and Mark and I signed plenty of copies for mail order and stock, and then we found ourselves at a pub on Charing Cross Road in the cheery company of Chris Wooding and Gillian Redfearn from Gollancz, not to mention a random European actor whom Gillian adopted (because he looked “lonely”, apparently) and also FP’s lovely Danie Ware, who’d organised the whole signing shebang, for which, Danie, many thanks. I got home late and weary, but it was worth it.

And then there’s this, the cover for the third volume in the 5 Lords Of Pain series. Another beauty. You’ll notice that the numbering, there on the first two, has been dropped. The numbers will now appear on the spines of the finished books.

Last but not least… I’ve had an offer from a proper, honest-to-gosh Hollywood production company, Shoreline Entertainment, to take out an option on the film rights for the Clouded World series. No contract has been signed yet, so I’m probably pre-empting things and tempting fate horribly by mentioning it here, but things are looking good and fingers are firmly crossed.

In the nearer future, I’m going to be at Forbidden Planet on Thursday 9th July from 6 to 7pm, doing a signing to promote The Age of Ra. That excellent author and thoroughly nice chap Mark Chadbourn will also be there, promoting his newie, Lord Of Silence. I trust that you out there will do your best to come along and swell the ranks of the signees, and that’s an invitation to all of Mark’s many fans as well. Come and see him, and discover that I’m nearly as personable in the flesh myself.

I’ve just received author copies of Gig, the French edition, and I can’t tell you how impressed I am with the design and execution. It’s easily the equal of the PS Publishing edition, but has added illustrations and everything. All the good French folks at Griffe d’Encre deserve a huge pat on the back (une tapote sur le dos?) for the work they’ve put in on the book, and so far the response from the Gallic reading public has been encouragingly favourable. Hourra!

Finally, I am now officially on board with SFFE, a website/blog/forum set up by Andy Remic to promote, in accordance with the title acronym, Science Fiction and Fantasy Ethics. Basically, it’s a place where genre authors and readers can get together and discuss our favourite fiction and sources of entertainment positively, with little or none of the snarking and trashing that goes on elsewhere on the web. The list of personnel involved is a who’s who (in my case, a who’s that?) of modern practitioners of the arcane literary arts, and it promises to be an exciting and rewarding project. Log on soon and join in the shenanigans. Andy, by the way, is someone I’ve met only once in person, but he’s a great chap, full of enthusiasm and vim and just the right amount of vitriol. Plus, his name is an anagram fan’s dream. Randy Mice, Mr Cyanide, Dry Ice Man… The list is seemingly endless.

And now it’s straight on to the second of the End Of Ages trilogy (or is it the Pantheon trilogy?). Got to keep moving. They can’t hit a moving target. The Age Of Zeus is all about the Greek gods, self-evidently, but I’m fusing that with a superheroes-gone-bad story and adding a kind of Dirty Dozen suicide mission aspect as well. So that’s another entry in the well-worn deities/spandex/military genre that we’re seeing so much of these days.

The French translation of Gig will be hitting French bookshops any day soon; check out the cover(s). I’m looking forward to seeing it, and trying to read it, in order to discover how Mélanie Fazi has resolved the palindromes conundrum.

Finally, there’s this: an audio version of “Wings”, courtesy of Tony Smith at StarShipSofa. Hit the link, and listen away…

And speaking of France, how about this, which was taken at last year’s Salon du Livre in Paris. What’s weird is that when I first looked at the picture, I couldn’t immediately recall having posed for it and wondered whether someone had mocked it up with Photoshop. Then a vague memory trickled into my brain: the Ugly Doll, the book, yes, that was me, I really did that. I’m not surprised the poor little fellow doesn’t like to read much, though. Must be hard with only one eye…

A final last item of France-based news is that Éditions Griffe d’Encre, headed up by the charming Magali Duez, are producing a French version of Gig. Publication date is spring, and Mélanie Fazi is the brave woman who’s agreed to tackle the task of rendering a work based around palindromes from one language to another. Here’s their press release.

On the Blighty front, I’ve recently signed a two-book deal with Solaris for follow-ups to The Age Of Ra. These will be — wait for it — The Age of Zeus and The Age of Odin. Can you see what I did there? Together the three will form a kind of trilogy, although none is a sequel or prequel to any of the others. The links will be thematic rather than narrative. I’ve yet to come up with a catchy catch-all title for the series. At present it’s a toss-up between The End Of Ages Trilogy and The Pantheon Trilogy, and I’m thinking of setting up a phone-in line and charging people a pound a pop to vote for their favourite.

Other than that, we passed a quiet-ish festive season here at Lovegrove Towers, although our two little Christmas-cranked human dynamos had Lou and me up and out of bed by 6 most mornings, and occasionally even earlier.

I’ve also knackered my back, but no one wants to hear about other people’s medical misfortunes, do they?

Meanwhile, in other news… It’s been a busy summer. I completed a five-book series for Barrington Stoke during July and August. It’s called The 5 Lords Of Pain and it’ll be appearing over the course of 2010 at two-monthly intervals, starting in April. They asked me for something with ninjas in. I gave them ninjas, demons, zombie ninjas, witches, and the end of the world. Which is a bargain package if ever I saw one.

In addition, I managed to turn out a plethora of pieces for the FT as well as guest introductions for a couple of forthcoming PS Publishing products: PostScripts #17 and a new edition of Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree. And I’ve just this week begun work on a new novel, BetterLife, for which the fine French publishers Bragelonne have secured world rights. So far the writing’s going well. But then, so far I’ve only done 10 pages.

Also, we had a delightful holiday in August, staying with Professor Adam Roberts (not the historian, the other one, you know, the genius SF writer guy, you’ve heard of him) and his family in the south of France, near Montpelier and Avignon. Weather wasn’t fantastic — cloudy almost every day, in fact, which meant the swimming pool was freezing but I didn’t have much choice about going in because Monty and Theo, who are apparently descended from penguins and don’t feel the cold, demanded it, as did Lily, Adam’s “bongweird” daughter. That aside, it was good wine, good food, lots of chocolate, and long late-night conversations, sometimes heavy, sometimes dumb, at the dining table on the terrace while the mosquitos savaged our tender parts.

My models for the book have been Alan Furst, masterly penner of World War II spy novels, and to a lesser extent Ian Fleming and Neil Gaiman, but its thematic preoccupations remain my own, namely factions in conflict with one another and the remoteness and lack of accountability of our rulers, be they temporal ones or deities. There’s also some stuff about the often fractious relationship between brothers, which I have no first-hand experience of but which I have extrapolated from my sons (on a purely theoretical basis, as I sincerely hope they don’t, in adulthood, turn out like the two brothers at the centre of the novel). Preliminary feedback on Ra from Solaris has been encouragingly positive, and the cover rough they’ve sent me has got me very excited.

I’ve made a couple of short story sales lately. One is to Extraordinary Engines, a steampunk anthology from Solaris, out this October and edited by the estimable Nick Gevers (I can never work out whether “estimable” is better or worse than “inestimable”, but Nick is certainly one or the other, if not both). The tale is called “Steampunch” (see what I did there?) and it’s about giant fighting robots. And why not?

The other story I’ve sold is another Chilton Mead tale. “Test Subject” is due to appear in issue #15 of Pete Crowther’s PostScripts, a super-length special dedicated to Paul McAuley.

And yet another Chilton Mead story, “Project: Verbivore”, appeared in the 17th January issue of Nature. It’s a neat little squib of a tale which I had an absolute ball writing. The mag’s editor commended it as “one of the corniest, most groan-inducing shaggy-dog stories” he’d ever read, which I took to be high praise indeed.

Finally, the “moonlighting” in the title to this item refers to what I consider to be one of the worst-kept secrets ever, namely that I have been publishing a Young Adult fantasy series under a pseudonym. I think now is the time to admit openly that I am the author of the Clouded World series. Jay Amory is I, and I am he/she, and the first two volumes of his/her/my opus are to be reprinted this July in a lovely new big fat omnibus package, entitled The Wingless Boy, with a second omnibus to follow in the autumn, The Clouded World, containing the second two books in the series. I shall now trot out a well-worn joke, with which I have tested the patience of every person at Gollancz at least once: you wait ages for one omnibus to arrive, then two come along together, ha ha ha ha ha. They’re certainly handsome-looking books, with gorgeous covers, and I can vouch for the quality of the contents. Fast-paced, gritty fantasy adventure, with a pair of engaging teenaged heroes, some daft machinery, and oh wait, surely it can’t be … an airship?

A reviewer in Locus rumbled the secret of Jay Amory’s true identity, as did a couple of cleverclogs e-correspondents of mine, who spotted the similarity between the premise of the series and my short story “Wings”. Basically, a few years back Simon the Gollancz editor suggested that I should have a bash at expanding the world of that story into a multi-volume saga, and a wise suggestion it was too. Foreign rights have been sold in Italy, German, Japan, Taiwan, Romania, Denmark and maybe a couple of other places as well, and sales have been brisk. I had great fun doing the four books and I proudly proclaim authorship of them here.

I was there to promote Untied Kingdom, a.k.a. Royaume Désuni, for the lovely people from Bragelonne at their castle-like stand. This involved several media interviews and two lengthy signing sessions. At the latter I sat beside Professor Adam Roberts, who was promoting the French edition of his lots-of-awards-shortlisted-for Gradisil and who shamed me by addressing the fans in fluent French while I fumbled along in Franglais. I achieved one of my life ambitions, though, in that I was asked by a young lady to autograph the cast on her arm. I also learned that the mass-market paperback edition of Days was last year’s top-selling SF title in France. News to me, but then no one tells me anything, hélas!

Lou and the boys came along too, and we spent a couple of days either side of the Book fair weekend introducing Monty and Theo to Paris. Monty was not impressed by the cuisine (not enough Marmite involved) although he did develop a penchant for pain au chocolat. He also enjoyed the play park at the Jardin du Luxembourg and the bateau-mouche ride along the Seine. Theo, for his part, was just happy to be sharing a bedroom with his brother, although as in so many other aspects of their fraternal relationship the feeling was not mutual. Both of them had fun on the Eurostar, although Monty was disappointed not to see fish outside the window as we passed under the Channel. I, on the other hand, was relieved.

A big thanks to everyone who helped make our visit a success, not least Stéphane, Alain and David, the grands fromages at Bragelonne, and the press secretary they could not function without, Leslie (Monty fell in love with her). Thanks also to our babysitter Lauryanne (whom Monty also fell in love with). For a holiday, it was all pretty exhausting, but for a work trip, it was a blast.

I’m really, really, genuinely, hugely excited to be working with Solaris. They’re a relatively new concern but they have buckets of enthusiasm, shedloads of experience as part of the Black Library, and an already impressive track record. Eric Brown’s Helix, for one, has been a considerable hit for them, and they did a gorgeous packaging job on Adam Roberts’s Splinter. I’d say I’ve joined a company who know exactly what to do with my sort of fiction.

A couple of new translations of my Barrington Stoke title Ant God have just appeared. It’s now available in Swedish (as Myrguden) and Welsh (as Sbectol Y Gwirionedd). The latter’s an interesting-looking language. When I see a page of it, I’m reminded of what happens when Monty sits at my computer when Word is up and bashes the keys at random.

Speaking of translations, this Easter I’m off to France for the Paris Book Fair, where I shall be promoting Untied Kingdom in its Frenchified form, Royaume-Desuni. I’m looking forward to spending time in the French capital with the lovely people from the mighty Bragelonne, who drink champagne at the close of work every evening (of course they do). I’m dragging the family along with me too, and we’re making a holiday of it. Monty is already excited at the prospect of croissants for breakfast, and I’m wondering if he’ll pull at the Jardin du Luxembourg again, as he did last time with a sweet little French girl. Mind you, this time he’ll be facing some competition from Theo, who’s a bit of babe magnet.

Finally… My father died at the end of January, a shock from which I’m still reeling. He was 88, which is a fair old age in anyone’s book, and he died at home, from a massive heart attack, so it was reasonably quick. One can’t really ask for more than that. But it was awful nonetheless. His funeral was well attended, a none-too-solemn affair with rousing hymns, a heartfelt eulogy and well-chosen poetry readings, and the reception afterwards was lively, as he’d have wanted.

I’ll tell you, though. Six feet is a horribly long way down.