Martin Millar's Blog, page 17

Les Petites Fées de New York

I've been too dull and uninspired to write anything interesting in my blog for a while.

Here are two books, due out soon. There's a French edition of The Good Fairies of New York - Les Petites Fées de New York - coming out on the 18th April, from Editions Intervalles. It's taken a long time for this book to be published in France and I'm glad it's made it eventually. And Soft Skull in the USA will publish a new edition of Lux the Poet in May. I'm pleased to have Lux back in print.

...

Other than th

Scottish Pronunciation

The main clan-name of the werewolves in Lonely Werewolf Girl is MacRinnalch. I recently tried to explain, via email, how to pronounce MacRinnalch. That was difficult.

The main stress would be on Rinn, like mac-RINN-alch, but the ch at the end is difficult to describe. This isn't pronounced like ch at the end of much, or hatch. It's meant to be the same sound as the ch in loch. That's a Scottish sound, not really used in England. Many people would pronounce loch as lok - Lok Lomond, Lok Ness. (I'

Queen Vex

Piatkus, which is an imprint of Little Brown, will publish the sequel to Lonely Werewolf Girl, provisionally entitled Queen Vex, in Britain in March 2010. Prior to that, they'll be putting out a new edition of Lonely Werewolf Girl in October this year. The contract isn't quite finalised yet, but I'm expecting this to happen, and indeed Piatkus have announced it at booktrade.info

So I am now contractually obliged to deliver the sequel. Actually, I'm contractually obliged to deliver it already, as

The Modern World Continues to Disappoint

I generally try to resist urges to re-live my childhood. Or early teenage years, I mean. There isn't anything from my childhood I'd actually want to re-live.

However. No longer having a record deck, I have records I haven't heard for many years. One of these being Hawkwind's Space Ritual, their live magnum opus from the 70s. As a young teenager, I spent a lot of time in my bedroom listening to this, nodding my head to the endless repetitive riffs, and marvelling at the mighty record sleeve. This

More Tomb Raider, and Snow

London has recovered from last week's snowfall. It wasn't that much snow, really, but it did seem to cause a lot of travel chaos. Hah. In Scotland, I used to walk a long way to school, in worse snow than that. My school never closed for the snow. Children would struggle in, drenched and frozen, and lay their coats over the radiators to dry them out, before struggling home through the snow again. That was common in winter.

Am deeply involved in new Tomb Raider game, Tomb Raider Underworld. I'm enj

Bedding

I just bought some new sheets, a duvet, and a duvet cover (and there is nothing more fascinating than a blog about bedding) For no good reason I persuaded myself that these new items should all be anti-allergic. Because think how harmful normal bedding might be. Even though I've used it all my life with no ill effects whatsoever.

Anyway, the new sheets and duvet arrived, all hypo-allergenic. They're all fine, except I didn't realise they were going to be so dazzlingly white. My new hypo-allergeni

Addiction

I suffered a minor spell of ill-health recently. While lying around, being tended by my coterie of glamorous literary secretaries, it struck me that I hadn't been very productive recently. I should be writing more. I also noticed how far behind I was with my email, and thought I should do something about that too. Then it struck me that I'd never played Tetris, which seemed strange, as it was one of the most popular video games ever. So there was only one thing to do. Find an online version and

Live and Dangerous

I had a very pleasant time at my brother's house for Christmas. It was nice to see my nieces and nephews excited by the festivities. I took some care in selecting presents for them. Unfortunately, they didn't seem that impressed. So I expect I failed in that endeavour. No doubt I'm useless at selecting presents. Ho Hum. But they were very happy about Christmas anyway, and their much better presents from their parents.

I gave my brother - a fan of old school heavy rock - 'Live and Dangerous', Thin

Kalix. Werwölfin von London

Lonely Werewolf Girl will be published in Germany in June 2009, by Fischer. Fischer is a big publisher, I'm looking forward to their edition coming out. Here it is at the publisher's website and at amazon.de. The title in German will be Kalix. Werwölfin von London. Which, you will notice, contains an umlaut. Umlauts are always cool. It's a shame that in English, there is never the opportunity to put two little dots over a letter.

Under different publishers, The Good Fairies of New York has been

More of My Backlist Unleashed on the World

The Millar backlist assault on the world continues. I just received the manuscript for the re-issue of Lux the Poet, which will be reprinted some time next year. And only yesterday the postman brought me a box of copies of Milk, Sulphate and Alby Starvation from the American publisher Soft Skull. This seems to be available on amazon.com already, although it hasn't reached amazon.co.uk yet.

Hmm. Can anyone actually prove I wrote all these books? I could deny it.

A brief story about when I was writi