It's been a while...

I'm just surfacing to say hello after an extremely hectic period. Copy-edits on THE TWELVE are done and dusted and the book is off to the setters. Proofs will shortly be forthcoming, and I'm more than a little excited.

There were a few big events while I was away that I should have linked to, but didn't because of a lack of time:

One was the relaunch of Book Roast, a blog that highlights authors and their work. Check it out.

A less cheery event was writer and blogger Travis Erwin losing his home to fire. He and his family escaped unharmed, but without a roof over their heads. An appeal was quickly set up to help him recover from this disaster, and you can still contribute at the special website.

Fellow Norn Noir proponent Gerard Brennan has been posting a series of short pieces that have recently been published in the Andersonstown News. They are anecdotes about a west Belfast shebeen (an unlicensed drinking club, for my American friends) called the Sweetie Bottle that was run by Gerard's grandfather. Check Gerard's blog for some old-style Belfast yarn-spinning.

Just today, my editor at Harvill Secker, Geoff Mulligan, sent a couple of very nice quotes from authors Ruth Dudley Edwards and Sean O'Callaghan. I put them up on my website along with some recent quotes from the Irish Times and Sunday Independent. Have a shufty.

So, it's on with writing Book Two. I'll blog in detail about this at a later time, but the Difficult Second Album is proving -- well -- difficult. It's getting there, though, and now that all the editing stuff is done I'm starting to gather some pace. One of my baddies is an especially nasty piece of work, and I'm enjoying finding out about him as I go. For one thing, he can't read - but it would be a terrible mistake to think that makes him stupid. A very terrible mistake.