A lot has been happening lately, most of it in-the-pipeline stuff, and while it would seem risky to talk about deals that haven’t yet been signed and sealed – tempting fate, counting your chickens before they’re hatched, telling God your plans, all that – here, nonetheless, is the latest.

The mighty Orion Books are to publish my next two novels, which are Untied Kingdom and The Penitent. The former is, of course, written and should appear in summer of 2002. The latter I have yet to begin, but I’m all geared up for it, helmet on, seatbelt fastened, hands on the joystick, ready to rock. All I can say about it at the moment is that the setting is extremely odd and that I’m very excited by the whole concept..

The Penitent should be out in mid-2003, so anyone currently holding their breath: stop it.

Meanwhile, the paperback of The Foreigners is out in August (I’ve just received cover proofs and it looks great) and a publication date has at last been formalised for my short-story collection Imagined Slights and the reissue of The Hope. The bad news is, that publication date is Spring 2002.

On the foreign front, it looks as though a Polish deal is in the wings for Days and possibly other titles from the backlist; a Swedish publisher has bought the rights to my Web book, Computipia; and a German publisher is sniffing around DAYS. So the word is slowly spreading through Europe. Viva the entente cordiale and bring on the schnitzel!

Finally, last week I recorded an interview with John Snider of scifidimensions.com. John is a thoroughly nice fellow from Atlanta, Georgia, and his site is informative, well designed and broad-ranging in its content, paying special attention to the comics medium, which is nice. The interview will be online in a couple of months’ time and it’s “audio streaming” apparently, which means you will have the novelty of hearing me shamelessly plugging my work instead of just reading me shamelessly plugging my work.

That’s all for now. Ta-ta! (As we British never say.)