Status Update

I've now consigned the much-scribbled-on copy-edited manuscript of Into Everywhere to my long-suffering editor. Into his actual hands, after I tramped through London's implacable August weather, enough rain that it was as if the waters of a new creation &tc, to Gollancz's new offices. Where I was told, at the front desk, that they don't accept packages, presumably because it's the twenty-first century, and it's all infopipes now. But however you deliver it, there's always a feeling that you haven't finished the novel so much as abandoned it -- even though you know that there comes a point where actual improvement gives way to mere tinkering, it's hard to tell, when you've been working on something so closely for so long, where that point actually is. Next up, in the march from vague notion to thingnicity: proofs and cover art. I've seen a cover rough already, and it looks rather good.

Meanwhile, I've sold two stories, one of which, will be my hundredth in print, more or less.* One, 'Rats Dream of the Future', to Asimov's Science Fiction; the other, 'Elves of Antarctica' to an anthology of original stories about climate change, Drowned Worlds, Wild Shores, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Not so much science fiction that last; not any more.



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*because amongst other things I'm counting two collaborations with Kim Newman