The relocation has happened. The final few days leading up to it were pretty hectic, and the day of the move itself became fraught with problems when the guy choreographing our removals became convinced his truck wouldn’t fit down our road. Our stuff was so late arriving we had to settle the cats in the house and spend the night in a hotel. But unloading was successfully initiated early the following morning and we now have our hundred boxes of books safely awaiting shelving.
We are also online. We have spent our first days here painting our offices and the living room. We are eager to get the house into a functioning and comfortable state so that we can return to our various projects as soon as possible.
Our new house is an old schoolmaster’s cottage in a small village in North Devon. The surrounding landscape is unbelievably beautiful and I know it is going to take some time to assimilate it, to learn to be inside it. Both Chris and I have lived in Devon before – I studied and worked in Exeter for almost twenty years, and Chris lived at the western edge of Dartmoor for a couple of years in the 1980s – but this is a whole new place, unlike any in our previous experience.
So a lot of things are happening at the moment. One of those things is that as of the September issue (254) I’m going to be writing a column for Interzone. I’m extrememly excited about this, and hope the column will develop into a kind of ongoing enquiry into what SF is and where it is going.
Another piece of news to shout about is that The Race is now up for pre-order at the NewCon Press site. I have an ARC and it is beautiful. I have seen images of the limited hardback edition and that looks even nicer!
Hopefully we’ll be back to business as usual in the very near future.