Well, it's a good while (as ChatGpt has noted!) since I announced on my website that my next book, The Mountain and Other Stories, is to be published by the science fiction imprint at Goldsmiths Press, Gold SF. I still have no publishing date, but things are now moving: the contract is signed, I've completed the (impressively lengthy and detailed) form for the marketing department, and now the art department have sent me a choice of three covers drawn by an artist. I've chosen one (I love it - it echoes beautifully the story and themes of the speculative lead novella, 'The Mountain') but won't produce it yet, as we need to finalise the decision. Perhaps it's just as well that it's taken so long, as, due to various circumstances, my last book, Five Different Stories About One Thing, was also a long time in coming to fruition, and at one point there seemed the possibility that I'd have two books coming out at once, which might have been somewhat difficult.
In the meantime, I've been working on a new novel, though family circumstances and other things, such as a trip this summer to Arras to speak at the conference for the European Network for Short Fiction Research, have somewhat sidetracked me, and I rather lost touch with it. In the end I decided to let it lie fallow for the rest of the summer, and ended up with a stunning revelation: that a novel I had written long ago and put aside as a failure was really the core of what was in effect this new version, and that I needed to begin again combining the two. Which (as long as the result is successful) goes to prove that breaks and fallow periods can be essential as part of the writing process.
Above is a pic of the place where I had my revelation.
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