Ooh...

Despite cruel and terrible threats that Amazon UK wouldn't be stocking it, turns out that they managed to get a few copies of Dragon in Chains by Daniel Fox, and lo! I did order it. And it arrived! And I have it looking all pretty and readable right in front me. Hurrah!

And the ever fabulous Juliet McKenna has posted some upcoming gigs here. Which, by strange coincidence, means that the Write Fantastic gig list has been updated with the jollies for the first half of the year.

Lovely things indeed!

Alt-Nano Update

And the alt-nano thing is going just a wee bit slow at the mo... slow, but I'm actually happy with how it's going, even if the words are crawling... Protag. A is wandering her way through the underworld, meeting challenges with varying degrees of success, Protag. B is currently trying to distract the bad guys from wondering just what in blazes Protag. A is doing for so long in Mysterious Building wot they can't get into. And then there's Protag. C, my female Bond-ish spy. A troublesome creature so far, who's yielded several pages of blather with only a few useful bits and one lovely line that suddenly gave her a firm shape.

Onwards we go...

Shattered

14,590 / 50,000 (29.2%)

Temp BFS site

And I completely forgot to mention - the British Fantasy Society has a temporary website up until the server change-over problems are resolved. You can find a much scaled down version of things at http://s256537080.websitehome.co.uk - it's pretty much the forum and news at the moment, but there is a rather cool facility to let you pick one of about five themes for the site, which I'm liking. :->

Fun and Frolics

Authors in the Wild!
If you're around London on Thursday 22nd January, 5pm - 7pm, Forbidden Planet in Shaftesbury Avenue will be holding a mass signing where nine lovely authors will be roaming freely doing the chatting and signing thing.
The peeps in question are: Joe Abercrombie, Alex Bell, Mark Chadbourn, David Devereux, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Tom Lloyd, Suzanne McLeod, Steven Savile and
James Swallow

Write Fantastic!
And if you happen to be in Oxford on Saturday 4th April, The Write Fantastic will be doing a reading & writing f&sf panel at Borders of Oxford as part as the Oxfringe Festival. It starts at 7pm and all are welcome to join in on the Q & A.

Not only that...if you're a Juliet E. McKenna fan, Monday 6th April will find the ever fab J.E.M. doing an illustrated talk at the Corner Club in Oxford covering Oxford and its influences on authors such as Tolkien, CS Lewis, Lewis Carroll and others.

Fantasycon
Yes, it's still going to happen! The web difficulties are almost sorted so the spanking new page should be going up soon. Apparently there's going to be an easy to click on paypal thingybob for membership purchasing purposes so it'll be even easier for you to spend your money!
Until then, don't forget: Fantasycon 2009 is 18th - 20th September at the Britannia Hotel, Nottingham and we have the ever lovely Ian Watson as MC.

And finally... the David Gemmell Legend Award has topped 2000 votes so far! Woot!

2009 Books

Inspired by a forum post at the lovely Wonderlands... here's some of the books I'm looking forward to this year.

The Mystery of Grace - Charles De Lint (It's Charles De Lint. Big Love!)
Irons in the Fire - Juliet E. McKenna (It's Juliet E. Mckenna! Ditto!)
Bone Crossed - Patricia Briggs (So far the series has been fun with the icky romance stuff at bare minimum and very subtly handled.)
Dragon in Chains - Daniel Fox (It's the super-sekrit identity of a lovely author chap, also Chains is said to be rather fab according to the early reviews and those lucky peeps that got their hands on an arc.)

Graceling - Kristin Cashore (A new Gollancz author - looks good.)
Red Gloves - Beth Vaughan (Also a new Gollancz author, and also looks good.)
The Ace of Skulls - Chris Wooding (Just because it looks like fun!)
Best Served Cold - Joe Abercrombie (Because Joe Abercrombie is a god!)
Jasmyn - Alex Bell (Another Gollancz new author, and it looks interesting.)
Republic of Thieves - Scott Lynch (A ha! At last, Mr Lynch, you have delivered!)

Orcs: Bad Blood Two - Stan Nicholls (Stan Nicholls! Orcs!! How can you want more?!)
The Spy who Haunted Me - Simon R. Green (Because Simon Green is the dude! Also am loving this series.)
The Prodigal Mage - Karen Miller (Because am a new fan)
Witches Incorporated - K.E. Mills (Ditto the above)
In Ashes Lie by Marie Brennan (Because Midnight Comes was aces!)
Destroyer of Worlds - Mark Chadbourn (Yay! Mark Chadbourn! A scarily intelligent chap who does mythic/urban fantasy fantastically and it's a fab series.)
Living with Ghosts - Kari Sperring (Because I heard Kari on a couple of a panels at Eastercon '08, and she was great! Also, it looks fascinating!)

Shattered

As we've got a shiny new year to play with, I've decided January is going to be the month of Nano: the revenge! Otherwise known as, let's do one of those Nano projects that didn't get done in November...

So this month's project is going by the temporary title of Shattered and is a heroic fantasy set in an alternate Britain. There will be wild battles and trips to the underworld and goddesses up to all sorts of hijinx and if my stumbling attempts at web-fu are working, below should be a progress meter courtesy of Zokutou...

3,195 / 50,000 (6.4%)