This is just to say

Just a quick note today to do two things: mention that I'm looking forward to seeing you at Black Library Live: Dublin, and point you in the direction of Nik's blog, where I have written a little guest post.

There. All done.

Plus, a William Carlos Williams ref in the post title. I can do brevity and literary-referency at the same time, me.

SF Bokhandeln - Sweden!

Coming to a Sweden near you this weekend (and I'm very excited about it!).... me!

Now, I don't speak Swedish, so I can't be sure, but I THINK these links will tell you everything you need to know:

For Friday and Saturday.

Also for Friday and Saturday.

And for Sunday.


This should be an awful lot of fun, so if you're... you know... in Sweden... come and join in!

Free Comic Book Day (or, May The Fourth be with you)

Be it an old gag, or an internationally recognised Festival, May the 4th is also this year's Free Comic Book Day, and I'll be a Forbidden Planet in London from 1 PM supporting 2000AD's FCBD publication, alongside Al Ewing, Ben Wilsher and - oh my goodness! - Ron Smith! Details, well, here. We are, apparently, "Legends of 2000AD", and with all due respect to the lovely Al and Ben, I suspect one of us is rather more legendary than the other three. And by that I mean... RON SMITH!

In the meantime, no blog post is complete without pretty pictures, so try this, the cover of the book I'm finishing now:

When you've done salivating over Neil Roberts's fine work, get your blinking gear around this:

And if that wasn't enough, here's the cover to a book I wrote oh... quite a while back... which is now being reissued as the first of the "Classic" series:

My pleasure :)

Gilead’s Blog

Any minute now, those lovely people at Black Library will be launching Gilead’s Curse, which is not only one of my all too infrequent forays into the Warhammer side of things, but one of the rare and exciting opportunities I have to collaborate with Nik Vincent (ie, the wife).

Gilead’s Curse  will appear alongside a reissue of our previous collaboration, Gilead’s Blood, which was published by the Black Library back in ninety-ten-a-hundred-and-frozen-to-death (and don’t you just love Stefan Kopinski's gorgeous matching covers? Two sides of Gilead!).

Nik and I have collaborated on quite a few projects over the years, and will continue to work together in the future: stand by for an adjunct to the Sabbat World’s Crusade saga. 

Gilead’s Blood was the first time we properly collaborated on a book. Hammers of Ulric was our second effort. Curse was a wonderful opportunity to return to such a powerful character as Gilead, and it has demonstrated to us that we can have as much fun working together as we have living together

So, grab a longbow and a decent sword, and delve into the adventures of this longstanding character. It was very satisfying to revisit him after all these years, and we jumped at the chance to write him again, because so many people at GamesDays and conventions asked us for more Gilead. It's funny to discover what an enduring figure he has become for certain people.

Oh, for those of you who don’t know, the Gilead books are about an elf, who is cut off from his ancestry and is roaming a lone path through a human-controlled world in search of his destiny. I’m told that we do particularly good Skaven, but the Skaven were actually Nik.

Oh, and there’s a lot of sand at the end... A LOT of sand.

Don’t get Nik started on sand.

By the way, back in the day, Forge World produced a large scale figure of Gilead based on the original cover art. I had one, because they very kindly sent me one, but it's long since disappeared into the black hole of innumerable moving days, and Forge World no longer have the moulds. Anyone out there got one? I’d love to know. Answers to the usual e-mail.

Doctor Who... and DemonCon

I had a great time at the Doctor Who 50th birthday event at Forbidden Planet last Saturday. Not the last event of its kind I'll be involved with this year, I imagine. It was a bit of an honour, to be honest. To have been even a small part of Doctor Who's fifty year history is a big fething deal to me.

What was the event specifically about? Thanks for asking, you at the back there. The BBC is re-releasing eleven classic Who novels this year, one for each Doctor. The design is gorgeous, and the set looks lovely all together (a full figure shot of each respective Doctor side-by-side on the spines, for instance). My novel The Silent Stars Go By was picked to represent the 11th Doctor, aka Matt Smith. This is what I mean about it being a bit of an honour.

Here we are (above) lining up in the delicious bowels (...uhn, delicious bowels? Really?) of London FP. From left: me, Gary Russell, Ben Aaronovitch, Terrance Dicks, and the lovely Shona Abhyankar, from BBC Books.

Add one very long queue (that's after we'd sat in the back room signing the vast stack of pre-orders) and serve.

Gary's book is the splendid 10th Doctor novel Beautiful Chaos, and Ben's is the 7th Doctor book, Remembrance of the Daleks, an adaptation of his own TV script, one of the best Sylvester McCoy adventures. Daleks and stairs? Hello? Special Weapons Daleks?

I finally got to meet a hero of mine, Terrance Dicks. This is the "official" photo of that moment...  

...but this blurry iPhone image much more effectively captures the friendly fun of the chat we had. Terrance's novel is the 6th Doctor story Players. His contribution to Doctor Who in books and on screen is colossal.

Gary and I were kept busy...

... until the very end. I owe Gary an awful lot. Thanks to his enthusiasm for the comic stories I used to script for Doctor Who Magazine 'back in the day', I got the chance to write for Big Finish, and then the Torchwood novel Border Princes, and then Doctor Who books and audios for the BBC. He's a lovely bloke too. Thanks, Gary.

Anyway, it was a great day. Thanks for coming along.

Speaking of great days, there's another in the offing tomorrow, when sunny Maidstone hosts the fifth Demoncon. Details below. I will be there... and it'll be a fine way to spend a Sunday.

Who is 50

Of course he is. We all knew that. And to celebrate that momentous birthday... well, lots and lots and lots of delicious Doctor Who things are happening this year. Cakes, for starters. Cakes in the shape of Daleks, most likely.  Hot air balloon flypasts where the hot air balloons are ingeniously made to look like Sontaran capsule ships. Or, indeed, Sontaran bonces, both being conveniently spherical. What else? I dunno. A special broadway revival of the musical Miss Zygon.

I digress ("No, really? You? Digress?" they all call out sarcastically).  I'd like to draw your attention to one delicious Doctor Who thing in particular. BBC Books is reissuing eleven classic Doctor Who novels -– one for each Doctor – from across their fiction range. Each one has a new cover, a new introduction, and looks pretty damn gorgeous, and my Eleventh Doctor novel The Silent Stars Go By has been selected to represent the Matt Smith incarnation. Look! Look below! Look, how pretty!

There's a good chance I'll be doing several signings for this as part of the 50th Anniversary event, but one is already set, and that's at Forbidden Planet in London on Saturday March the 9th. Here's the skinny. So materialise, get a signed copy, plus signed copies of the books by Gary, Ben and Terrance, and a very good day will have been had by you. And no mistake.







Miss Zygon. *makes a Sheldon Cooper "I've just amused myself" yelp-laugh*

It means "really very good"

It's Black Library Live this coming Saturday in Nottingham, home of the eternally burning galaxy. I hope we'll see you there.

But besides, that... Other business.  I do like to collect a good phrase, me. A nice, fresh, unexpected use of language. A few weeks ago, the writer Sarah Pinborough declared on her Facebook thread that "If I write more than four thousand words a day, my brain turns to wang." Turns to wang. I ask you. That's just brilliant. You don't see Shakespeare doing that.

Sarah's a great source of such elegant combinations of words. She said something about the Pope's resignation too. She described it as him "fucking off from his Popehood." Because that's what it should be called, officially. In the Vatican. On scrolls.

She's a fine writer, so it's no wonder she turns a memorable phrase. Another memorable phrase that dropped into my lap recently came in an email to this very website, which described one of my books as "pretty boss sausage". It means "really very good". I am now using it. I am also now using the "turns to wang" thing too.

Nik found something that was pretty boss sausage the other day (behold how I am using it in a sentence AND making a passable segue out of it? Yeah? Yeah? Get me and me fancy writing footwork). Anyway, it was this, a write up of Ravenor that properly made my day. Enjoy.