Yes yes, I've been looking after a baby (or, as it now appears, a one-year-old proto-toddler) for the past four months, so haven't had time to update my blog. And yes, I am indeed coming back to it now because I've got a forthcoming piece of published writing to promote.
So I'm a lazy self-publicist. It's not as if anyone else is going to be arsed to publicise me, is it?
Anyway. What's happened since March?
...Oh, various things. The child Smith turned out to be a damn good choice of eleventh Doctor, figureheading the best season of Doctor Who since the departure in 2005 of the blessed St Christopher. The UK general election appears to have resulted in, approximately, the Ewoks becoming the Emperor's trusted henchmen. The second and third episodes of Sherlock pissed away the premise of the very brilliant first at an alarming rate. I've reread Bruce Sterling's highly influential (on me, anyway) Schismatrix, and found its brilliance undiminished. Fantom Films are releasing three more titles in their series of Time Hunter talking-book CDs, raising hopes that they'll be releasing my Peculiar Lives in this format at some point soon.
And Obverse Books -- publishers of Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus among other titles -- have announced that they've got a licence to publish Faction Paradox short stories, and that they damn well intend to use it.
Specifically, in February next year Obverse will be publishing Faction Paradox: A Romance in Twelve Parts. It will feature my longish short story "A Hundred Words from a Civil War", which I've been writing for the past few weeks in gaps between serving Her Majesty's government as a junior manager on the Death Star Project and being used as a climbing-frame by a tiny screeching dervish.
(In answer to the question perhaps two of you are asking -- no, it's not literally a hundred words long. It's a drabbleplex, a word which I made up just last week to describe the kind of thing it is. Just as a drabble is a piece of fiction consisting of exactly 100 words, so a drabbleplex is a piece of fiction consisting of exactly 100 drabbles.)
I'll have to update my website properly at some point soon with details of this. In the meantime, consider yourselves provisionally informed.
Welcome back to posting. Will you be coming to Greenbelt?
ReplyDeleteYes, we should all be there, all being well. I'm not speaking this year, though not for want of trying.
ReplyDeleteI'll have to write one now you, new form inventing tormentor you!
ReplyDeleteSimon BJ