2006 has started out a funny old year.
First off, the big news is that Lou is expecting again, and if all goes according to plan the nipper should be appearing in late July. It’s going to be a boy, in spite of Monty’s conviction that there’s a penguin in his mummy’s stomach (don’t ask). The only drawback as far as I can see is that this will leave Lou in even more of a minority in our household. At present the male/female ratio is 3:1, if you include the cat, which I do, lack of testicles notwithstanding (I mean the cat lacks testicles, not me). Soon it’s going to be 4:1, which means Lou having to deal with four erratically behaved and congenitally irresponsible male creatures. Poor her.
On the writing front, the curse of sequelitis has hit again, and I’ve halted work on the Provender Gleed follow-up which I began in February. The plot wasn’t gelling and the characters seemed to decide they didn’t need to be in another book after all. It may that I’ll take another bash at it at a later date. In the meantime…
Well, I’m in a bit of a quandary here, because I promised in my last update that I’d reveal details about the other new project I’ve been working on, and in the event I can’t. What’s happened is that I have a fantasy series coming out, the first volume appearing in August, but now, for various reasons, it’s being published under a pseudonym and for the time being I have to keep my involvement in its authorship a secret. Which is a bugger, because I’d like nothing more than to shout about it and give it a right old ballyhoo, being as I’m very excited about it. I’d love to tell you that the series spins off from a well-known short story of mine, rebooting the world I created in that tale. I’d love to tell you that each volume is fast-paced action/adventure from start to finish, and that each is self-contained but forms part of a larger unfolding story, and that I’m channelling my inner comics geek to write this, and that there are airships in it…
But then there are airships in virtually everything I do, so that’s hardly a surprise.
As it is, I’ll have to leave it for now, but I swear I’ll post more on the subject once the series is up and running and we know where we are, pseudonym-wise.
Oh, and a quick P.S. The venerable Mr Crowther of PS Publishing fame has agreed to produce a limited-edition collection of all my short fiction from 1997-2005. The book’s working title is Diversifications and it’ll be coming out in — wait for it — late 2008. So, plenty of time to start saving up for what will undoubtedly be yet another beautifully put-together PS package.