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%)

Year End bits

• Oh noes! Elastic Press is ceasing to be... Andrew's done a full press release thingy on the Elastic newsfeed, a copy of which is also on the BFS boards. 'tis a great shame as Elastic always put out some neat looking books.

• Coo... Stan Nicholls of the The David Gemmell award thingy reports that they've had 800 votes since they opened the polls on boxing day. How cool is that! And that's just to get the long list to short list. If you've not voted for your fave heroic fantasy book of the year, get over there and do so as the voting is dead simple and you don't even need to register on their website or anything. Apparently, the final award will be given out at a do in June, at the Magic Circle HQ in London. Crikey! (Must remember to mention this to our Hell's magician boyf.)

• Ooh er... Newcon 5 is down for 26th - 27th September '09. Which, unless I'm very much mistaken, is the week after Fcon is due to be... Oh that's going to be interesting... :-> (Of course, the Fcon site is due a major relaunch next month so our details aren't up on the current site yet...)

Book blast:

And talking of David Gemmell, have recently read Legend and Waylander as I'd never read them before and thought I really should get around to it... Legend was pretty intense and it had me hooked right up until the end... and then there was a bit of a cop out with one of the characters and a miraculous resurrection when they really should have stayed dead. Bugger. Things were going so well until then. Didn't help that the purpose of the resurrection felt like a blatant rewarding of the hero chap by bringing his woman back to life. A woman that died a decent fighting death too. Sigh.
Waylander didn't quite have the intensity but the ending was a bit more solid and the characters were very well drawn.

Also read Ravens of Avalon by Diana L Paxson - which I picked up from our Jan at the last Fcon. Apparently this is connected to the Mists of Avalon series that Marion Zimmer Bradley did (which, of course, I hadn't read...) But Ravens was some serious fabulous stuff - it was a pagany telling of the Boudica story just busting with enchantment all over the place. So, quite naturally, I then had to read Mists of Avalon by MZB just to see where it all began and I was totally blown away by it. Utterly, absolutely, magical stuff. Doing the Arthur thing from Morgan le Fay's perspective. Brilliant!

Also read Duma Key by Stephen King. Definitely a cracking good yarn, that one. Bit of a heartrending death towards to the end and some great characters.

Now I've a pile of Xmas and birthday books to get through so hope everyone had a fab Xmas and have an excellent new year!

- X -

Daemons Are Forever

So I have just this minute finished reading Simon R. Green's Daemons Are Forever and I'm already champing for the next one. (Due around April next year, I think...)
Not that I'm at all unbiased, as I'm a bit of a Simon Green fangirl, but Daemons was ace! For why? Well, for a start, I always find Mr Green's stuff eminently readable, and Daemons is no exception.

Edwin Drood makes for a fun main character as he stumbles from hijinx to disaster and back again, saving the world with wild magics, weird tech and a fantastically depreciating sense of humour. And he's got the perfect partner in Molly Metcalf, witch of the wild woods. This would be another thing I love about Green's work, he always creates fabulous partnerships (Hawk and Fisher being my absolute favourite...).

There's family politics and bloody battles... and a Deathstalker crossover! (...and a very cool one at that! Yay!) As well as some promising things for future volumes.

Although Daemons does suffer from the first couple of pages being a bit on the infodumpy side it's generally one of those that begs the wild ride cliche to be liberally applied to any attempt to describe it. So if you haven't already read it, now would be a perfect time to add it to your Xmas list...

Nano Finite

And we're done! :->

Final Nano wordcount - 108,678! Woot! Thanks in no small part to a mini competition between me and two others yesterday as we updated word counts every hour until closing in the bid to out do each others wordage...

On the regional word war front - yesterday England Elsewhere managed to crawl to first place... alas, 'twas but a brief victory as by this morning and the final numbers, Ireland had beaten us over the head and snatched back their top place. So we end this year at number 2. Which is, if memory serves, a few places better than the very tragic placing we had last year.

Worldwide, still number 12, and still beaten by London. Bah, humbuggery.

However, all numbers aside, this one was a particularly good Nano. I'll lay claim to two (short) novels finished (one of which is even polishable), a very bad very short story, half a SF novel, and the opening chapters of two urban fantasies. Plus a few bits of random blathering. We like random blathering...

And now there's books waiting to be read, and work to be done...

Nano day 27

Word count: 88366. Lawks a mussy, could be better. Can I use sudden attack of the sinuses as an excuse? Nah, didn't think so. :->

We are number 2!! in the regional wordwar... hurrah! Number 12 worldwide... still being beaten by London (bastards!).

And in other news... 'tis my birthday, I'm old.
Also, received many many books! (They know what I like!)

That will be all...