Forget Snakes on a Plane...

Kim Newman's history of the Hammer horror film in this month's Fortean Times mentions a "tragically unmade" project entitled Zeppelin vs Pterodactyls.

Pairs of Linked Columns

Recently I experienced what I seem to remember we used to call a "day off". In case you've never had cause to encounter one of these, it seems to involve getting up very late, sitting on a sofa watching old Doctor Who videos with a cat on your lap, and drinking beer occasionally.

That was last... Thursday, I think.

This indicates that things are beginning to get back to normal after the manic rush to finish Nobody's Children, but still very slowly. I keep being terribly busy, both at work and at home. My aspiration is that things will hopefully calm down a bit next week.

I might even be able to start blogging properly again. Let it be noted that I owe the assembled company mini-reviews of The Steep Approach to Garbadale and Margaret Atwood's rather excellent The Penelopiad. I really should read more Atwood. In the meantime I'm so tired I can barely type, so you'll have to bear with me.

That said... this month's column is up at Surefish, and follows on rather nicely from last month's. And I've sent off a revised proposal for the next long-term writing project, which is looking very hopeful now, and which I may say more about shortly.

Meanwhile, I've had a backlog of photos which I've just uploaded to Flickr.

I'm gonna spend my Easter with a Dalek:


Look! There are spiders!


And a couple of weeks ago now B. and I and all the members of B.'s extended family visited a very decent pub in Worcestershire...

...and a ruined abbey in nearby Gloucestershire.

View the whole set here.

Hullo.

I'm still knackered from finishing the novella, and from my frenetic and unrestful week. This has included taking a six-year-old and a three-year-old to a chocolate factory (with the able assistance of their parents, admittedly), attending the theatre in aid of my mother-in-law's birthday celebrations and writing another column for Surefish. [ETA: I should clarify that the first two of these were pleasant as well as tiring.]

How are you?

On Tuesday I finally got round to updating my website to reflect the existence of Nobody's Children (and also of the forthcoming reprint of "Sex Secrets of the Robot Replicants"). I've even put in an extra bit in my F.A.Q. about them. I wonder if anyone ever reads that now Wikipedia exists.

I had been hoping to stick the whole of my rejected proposal for The Curse of Odin-Hotep, as promised, but I'm too knackered. Maybe later. In the longer term, the whole website's in urgent need of a design overhaul, but I lose the will to live whenever I even try to think about that.

Oh look, there I go again.

"Mim," I Cry

The blurb for Nobody's Children is now up at the Big Finish site. Since I wrote large chunks of said blurb, I don't imagine anyone will mind my reproducing it here:

The war is meant to be over. The Draconian Empire has won the day, and the Mim have lost pretty much everything.

That includes the borogoves of Proxima Longissima, the Mim's beloved children. The Draconians claim the borogoves are foundlings, abused and neglected by their parents. In the Empire they will be protected and provided for.

Fearing that his species faces extinction, one of last surviving Mim begs Bernice Summerfield to come and see for herself. Benny just wants to do right by her own son, Peter, and the brother or sister who may follow him. But soon the borogoves are, rather unexpectedly, her godchildren, and Benny becomes their best hope for a future peace.

As if dead oceans and burning deserts weren't hostile enough, Benny must enter the labyrinthine corridors of diplomacy - where right and wrong are questions of perspective, and even her own loved ones are not wholly innocent...

As I'm sure I've mentioned before, the book consists of three novellas, by Kate Orman, Jon Blum and me. It's going to be fab. Do buy it.

In unrelated but startlingly contiguous news, Dave Stone's novel The Two Jasons is a sequel to my short story "Sex Secrets of the Robot Replicants" in A Life Worth Living. And if you haven't read that short story... well, it's going to be reprinted as a prelude to Dave's book, so you can now. (Or you can just buy A Life Worth Living, of course.)

The website's overdue an update reflecting these releases, but I'm going to be tearingly busy for the next couple of weeks, catching up with everything I should have been doing for the past three or four months. Expect an increase in blog traffic soon... but not quite yet.

Brainchildren

I've started the final push towards a finished version of "Nursery Politics", and thus of Nobody's Children. The whole process of writing this latest novella has been surprisingly gruelling -- I'm not really sure why, but I'm sure you'll have noticed me complaining about the fact.

It'll be over soon, though, and there's potentially good news about another project afterwards (not that I'm ready to think about that as yet).

While I've been doing this, B. has been finishing off and displaying her latest piece of art: Vesica Piscis, part of an Easter art exhibition run by a local church. It looks like this.



More photos are visible here... and for what a vesica piscis actually is, see here.