Werewolf this Christmas

Last post for Christmas mail in Britain is the 20th, which means there's still time to solve your Christmas present dilemmas by purchasing signed copies of Lonely Werewolf Girl for your loved ones. Available now from my website. Lonely Werewolf Girl will make the ideal Christmas present. And why will it make the ideal Christmas present? Because I want you to buy a copy of course. What finer reason could there be?

Airmail abroad usually takes 5-7 days so normally there would still be time to rush it to your humble shack in the Alaskan wilderness, except I notice that the last posting date for Christmas airmail has actually now passed, so maybe not. But it might get there in time anyway, I always send these books out as soon as the order arrives.

Of course, having a copy of Lonely Werewolf Girl arrive a few days after Christmas isn't such a bad idea anyway. It might go a long way towards healing the damage you've done by buying your sister a really crappy present, or throwing up in the kitchen at your parents' little Christmas soirée for the neighbours.

My kettle broke! Just stopped working, without warning. And this only days after the hobnob biscuit crisis came to light. It's like the Gods are against me having tea and biscuits. Am now heading to the shops to buy some cheap replacement, before settling down to hurl abuse at the television during the Arsenal Chelsea match.

Biscuit Shortage

Gloom settled in this week after Arsenal's defeat at Middlesbrough. It was the culmination of a series of poor performances, not helped by all our best players being injured. But the other players should have done better anyway.

Making things worse, an unexpected biscuit crisis arises. Or cookie crisis, depending on where you're reading this. Very mysteriously, hobnobs have disappeared from the local supermarket. I'm baffled. And perturbed. Hobnobs form part of my staple diet. I need regular tea and biscuits to keep on writing. This could delay my next book by months. Years possibly.

They still stock chocolate hobnobs, but I don't eat them, I need the plain variety. What can have happened? I wasn't expecting a biscuit shortage; sometimes it seems like you just can't depend on anything.

Well, with work grinding to a halt here, I better just plug some friends -

Ivy Webb's new CD

Next Door But One's new music

Sammi's fiction magazine, Neonbeam.

Thraxas

With regard to the blog below, here's an update, written on 25 August, 2012 - I've been working on a ninth Thraxas book. This has been going well, and I hope to have it published as an ebook before the end of the year.
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I get a lot of email about Thraxas, the series I wrote under the name of Martin Scott. And a lot of people leave messages on the Thraxas website, asking about the next book. So I thought I'd write a blog about it, so as I can have somewhere to refer people, when they ask about it.

The situation with Thraxas is: I wrote eight books in the series. They were published by Orbit in Britain, Baen in the USA, and quite a lot of other publishers around the world. The first book won the World Fantasy Award, and Thraxas has been translated a lot.

However. Orbit didn't want to publish a ninth book. Baen did, but after a long time, contract negotiation between my agent and Baen broke down. This was over a rights dispute, rather than money. I'm not going to go against my agent on this. You can't just give a publisher whatever they want in a contract.

So. I thought both Orbit and Baen did a good job with their publishing of Thraxas, but at present there is no publisher for a ninth book.

There is another side to all this. Really, in the past couple of years, I haven't paid as much attention to Thraxas as I should have. A few years ago I was overwhelmed by agoraphobia. At the same time, my writing career took a nosedive, leaving me without a publisher for anything, including any books under the name of Martin Millar, all of which went out of print. When this happened, I found it hard to get going on anything.

After some time, I got things moving again with the publication of Lonely Werewolf Girl. This has gone very well, but it took all my attention. More or less at the same time, Soft Skull in the USA re-printed The Good Fairies of New York. This has also gone well. So, writing career now going rather better.

However, given the agoraphobia, and general career problems, I didn't have enough energy to really apply myself to Thraxas. Possibly if I had I'd have sorted something out. But for the immediate future, there isn't any prospect of a ninth book coming out. I regret this, but I don't feel too badly about it. Having eight books published in the series was quite a success really, more than I expected when I wrote the first one. Thraxas is a fine character and I'm pleased to have unleashed him on the world.

In other news, I'll soon sign a contract for a Greek edition of Lonely Werewolf Girl. Next year should see its publication in the USA, Italy and Greece.