Missing [Peculiar] Time[s]

This morning I experienced lost time as a result of a government conspiracy. I'm still optimistic that Gillian Anderson will come into the room at some point and show me her mosquito bites.

It's particularly annoying, though, as I'd been intending to placate you all with a nice long post to make up for my silence during the rest of this month. Now I have to be somewhere else too soon, so sadly it'll have to wait. I'm aware that my pledge to update this blog regularly this year is looking pretty hollow now -- oops.

In the meantime... four teasers for the stuff I should have been blogging about, haven't been and hopefully will be soon.

1. I've read Werewolves in their Youth by Michael Chabon and The Casebook of Carnacki - Ghost Finder by William Hope Hodgson. They're good. I'm also -- cue angel trumpets and hallelujahs -- within 45 pages of finishing Blue shagging Mars.

2. I've been writing a couple of articles for a book about Doctor Who and getting paid for it. More on this once the book in question's been announced.

3. Riding the trough of the wave as always, I've started using Twitter. It's not the hugest time-waster on the web, but like a number of other bloggers I've been finding that my thoughts tend to be more easily entered there in condensed form, rather than elaborated at length here. (In future I'll try to make sure I do both. I may also put a Twitter feed in here, if I can work out how.)

4. Did I mention B. and I are expecting a baby in August? (Er, I may not have done. We are. An actual baby. You know, a human one. With nappies and stuff.) This has been demanding an unpredictably large proportion of my attention of late.

Finally, Obverse Books have now revealed the final cover for Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus, and I've updated my website accordingly. You may notice (especially if you've just read the entry below) that the blurb's rather familiar: this is because the editors decided that I'd put it as well as they could, and asked my permission to swipe it for the cover. This means that now I've put the official blurb up, my Iris Wildthyme page and my Celestial Omnibus page inevitably read almost identically to one another. I may have to write something else to go on the first one.

Note "new stories from Paul Magrs, Philip Purser-Hallard and Steve Cole amongst many others", though. Stuart wrote that bit, not me...