I’m thrilled to announce that my novella Bellony, which originally appeared in the Eibonvale Press anthology Blind Swimmer, will be reprinted in the April issue of the very wonderful Lightspeed magazine. Lightspeed publishes some of the best shortform fantasy and SF around – the current issue features stories by Genevieve Valentine, John Crowley and Robert Reed – and I’m delighted that Bellony will be finding its way out to a whole new audience. The issue will also feature a mini-interview with me – I’m working on that right now. The questions they’ve come up with are fascinating.
Another very pleasing piece of news is that my novella Spin should be going to press in the near future. Having now handled and read the first in the TTA Novellas series, Mike O’Driscoll’s excellent Eyepennies, this is something I’m even more excited about than I was before. These little books are truly wonderful – beautifully designed and produced, lovely to hold and with an elegant and clear layout that’s a pleasure to read. At £25 for the complete set of 5, the TTA Novellas subscription offer really is superb value for money and I’m very much looking forward to reading the other titles in the series as they appear.
Aside from nipping up and down to London a couple of times on various errands, I’ve spent most of the past week at my keyboard, working on the third draft of What Happened to Maree. The book is now almost 20,000 words lighter – a lot of the joy in redrafting lies in cutting words! – and the whole thing feels smoother and cleaner and more free-flowing as a result. There’s been a pretty radical restructuring, too. Anyone who was at my BSFA gig back in October might be interested to know that the section I read out no longer exists…
Reading: Helen Marshall’s extraordinary debut collection Hair Side, Flesh Side. Wonderfully original, lyrical, and delightfully dark. Kind of like Borges mixed with (Clive) Barker and a generous pinch of HPL thrown in for good measure. I am loving it.
Watching (for the fourth time): Michael Mann’s Thief. Awesome. That opening sequence – second to none.
Thinking about (very cautiously): new work.