In Other News...

...It seems as if I'll be even busier at Greenbelt than previously announced. In addition to writing a daily blog for surefish (don't worry, I'll link to it from here), they'll also be running an article to tie in with my talk about (all together now) The Spirituality of Doctor Who. Those pieces will probably be going up on this page, so keep your eyes peeled over the Bank Holiday weekend.

If you're going to be at Greenbelt, you'll be able to see me actually delivering the talk at 1pm on Monday 29 August at Between the Lines: with luck a full transcript will materialise eventually to join last years' talks here. If you'd like to hear me and a panel of other self-appoitned experts, wittering on about blogging, then you'll need to be at the same venue at 6pm on the Sunday -- coincidentally, two hours before the venue shows Greenbelt speaker Paul Cornell's Doctor Who episode Father's Day.

In other other news, my hardback copies of Peculiar Lives arrived from Telos yesterday, and are really rather nice. The cover is dark blue, with a textured leather effect (not real leather, obviously) and there's a ribbon bookmark, adding to the whole elderly-book feel. These publishers take real care over, and pride in, the physical appearances of all their books, and with these hardback editions it really shows.

If you're still considering whether or not to buy the novella, whether in hardback or paperback, then don't forget that a sample chapter of the novella is being hosted online at Outpost Gallifrey. Read it before you shell out (and then shell out, obviously).

Now that the hardbacks are out, and following the release of Wildthyme on Top, the only fiction of mine that currently remains to be released is "The Long Midwinter" in Short Trips: The History of Christmas. Whether anything further will have been announced by the time that comes out remains to be seen... but frankly, I seem to be suffering from a certain amount of creative burnout just at the moment. The past month has been the least productive time-off-work I've had for years, and I've had to put a couple of hopeful-looking projects on the back-burner from sheer lack of ability to proceed with them.

I'm thinking I might take a bit of a sabbatical after Greenbelt, and spend two or three months without trying to write creatively at all. The hope is that depriving myself of the opportunity to follow through on my ideas will immediately result in a plethora of them presenting themselves, all of which I can jot down and save for later, when I can return to work refreshed and reinvigorated. This, at least, is the theory.