(“Revamped”. See what I did there? Trust me, I’ll be using that pun again. Sooner than you think.)
Same brilliant Clint Langley illustration — brand-new title, blurbage and lettering.
That bit directly above my name seems downright surreal. “New York Times Best Selling Author”? You could knock me down with a very flimsy feather.
Well, you see, it’s like this…
I know I said I wasn’t going to do another pantheon book. I’d had enough of gods and families of gods and humans and their families, makeshift or otherwise. But then Jon the Editor asked would I mind doing another one for him and the other fine gentlefolk at Solaris, and soonish? And I thought about it, not for very long, and said, OK. Because I’m a nice obliging chap and because, frankly, I realised I did want to do another one after all.
Soooo… Dust is going on hold for the time being. It’s not been abandoned, it’s just being placed on the back burner, where it can bubble and froth to its heart’s content until such time as it’s ready to re-emerge.
Which pantheon will I be covering? I’ve been having fun with assorted blog-thread correspondents, especially one Nick Sharps, discussing the various deity clusters available, but the one that strikes me as having the most potential is the MesoAmerican lot. I’m already working up the synopsis, so I can’t say much else here. But there will most likely be flying saucers. Yes, you read that right. Flying saucers.
In other news, The Age Of Odin is doing nicely for itself sales-wise, especially Stateside, where… Well, take a look for yourself. You’ll need to scroll down a bit, but there it is, in at #33 in this week’s New York Times mass-market paperback bestsellers list. Hurrah! (NB. The link is valid only for the current week.)
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So there I was, driving through the worst snow storm I’d ever seen, in a crappy rental Vauxhall Astra, with Abortion in the passenger seat offering useless advice and trying to get the stereo to work and, when he wasn’t doing that, rolling up joint after joint and smogging the car up with skunk fumes. Our rate of progress was roughly ten miles an hour. It was getting dark. We didn’t know exactly where we were going.
At what point, I asked myself, was I going to accept the fact that this was the worst plan in the entire history of mankind?
Knowing me, never. Stubborn, I was. Pigheaded, Gen used to say. “Except,” she would add, “that’s an insult to pigs. Compared to you, they’re quite reasonable animals.”
The snow filled the windscreen like static on an untuned TV. The Astra kept slewing and lurching, its wheels somehow finding every slippery patch on the road, despite my best efforts. Every half mile or so we’d pass another abandoned vehicle whose driver had had the common sense to admit defeat and dump their ride by the roadside and head off for shelter on foot rather than blunder on. This storm wasn’t letting up any time soon. The forecasters predicted it’d last at least another twenty-four hours and maybe longer. Blizzard conditions. Batten down the hatches, Britain. The future’s white. No one with any brains is going anywhere. >Read More<