New for Spring

The big news for Spring is that the novel I wrote out of Anthony Burgess's Black Prince screenplay, working with his idea of doing the 14th-century in the style of Dos Passos, is going to be published. Over at Unbound enough pledges have been obtained to make the book a reality (in October, I think), and there, at the head of this post, is the gorgeous Jeffrey Alan Love cover-art under which livery it will appear. I'm seriously delighted by this.

Otherwise things have been chugging along. The SF Awards season is coming to an end, with all the important prizes either awarded or shortlisted, which means I can now say that no novel or short-story I wrote during 2017 has troubled any of the shortlist drawer-uppers of any award. This was what I thought would happen, and although it's of course disappointing to me personally it's a matter of perfect indifference to SF as a whole (that's the third year straight this has been the state of affairs, which tells you something about where my work stands in terms of the genre's collective markers of esteem). I have some Real Town Murders sequel news to share, which I will do shortly, and one or two other things going on. But mostly, so far in 2018, I have been doing other sorts of writing, specifically (a) putting down the markers on a 'Literary Biography' of H G Wells, and (b) slowly building the argument for a scholarly monograph on Samuel Taylor Coleridge.