This time last month, I was getting back into the routine after getting home from World Fantasy Con in Brighton. That was very enjoyable on the personal level; seeing friends and catching up with their lives and careers in these uncertain times. Professionally, I was busy. I chaired one panel about writing fantasy for younger readers, from pre-school to teens, which was very informative. I spoke on a panel about ‘writing fighting’ which revealed a breadth of views and experiences among the authors, and that’s always good. I gave a reading – well, two short readings, to give a taste of The Green Man’s Holiday, launched at the convention, and of The Riven Kingdom, coming next year from Angry Robot.

Then there were any number of conversations about the business, and the craft, of writing. I had a very pleasant ‘meet the author’ chat with some lovely people, and over the course of the weekend, signed a highly satisfactory number of books & programmes. A particular delight was signing a much reread and cherished copy of The Thief’s Gamble, my debut novel, in its original edition. Seriously, never feel you shouldn’t ask an author to sign a less than pristine book, and there’s no need to apologise. Every writer I know loves to see them.

We launched The Green Man’s Holiday, alongside Wizard’s Tower Press’s other new titles. The third in the Wiz Duo novella series offers The Sheltering Flame by Ruthanna Emrys alongside Walking a Wounded Land by Andrew Knighton. I’ve read and enjoyed previous work by both these authors and hope to get to these new stories soon. The other title launched was Of The Emperor’s Kindness by Chaz Brenchley which is as intriguing as it is deceptively low-key. There was cake and wine and chatting with friends – and Garth Nix and Peter Hamilton both keen to buy copies of Dan’s latest adventure and get them signed, being fans of the series. How’s that for a great day?

Incidentally, thanks to everyone who has shared positive and enthusiastic ratings and reviews for The Green Man’s Holiday online. Personal and digital ‘word of mouth’ is absolutely vital for small press publications, ever more so as social media fractures and scatters communities.

Since then? November is the Society of Authors’ AGM month, so I had a fair bit to do relating to that. The AGM was very positive and constructive, looking forward to continuing current campaigns to defend copyright, and to promote author care by publishers, among much else. I also took part in an online round table discussion hosted by the Department of Arts and Humanities, European University Cyprus, exploring the uses creators might make of AI tools, or not, and why. If and when that’s offered in the public domain, I’ll share a link.

I’ve also tackled a considerable amount of domestic and work-related administrivia to clear the desk for background reading and plot wrangling for the next Green Man book. I’ve done some website tidying up, and we have now incorporated information about JM Alvey’s historical murder mysteries into this site, along with observations I made along the way about writing fiction set so far in the past in this world.

Last but by no means least, I’ve added a short story The End of the Road, previously published in the final edition of Albedo One magazine, to the Some Free Stories page. Think of it as a seasonal gift, however you may celebrate.

I will now split my time for the rest of this month between Christmas preparations, socialising with friends and family over the holiday break, and the aforementioned reading and plotting before I start writing Dan’s next adventure next year.

I’m taking the day off after a very busy weekend, which was most enjoyable and ticked all the professional requirements for such activity, especially publicising my work ahead of The Green Man’s Holiday being published on Thursday.

We had 100+ people attending our panel on Saturday at Comic Con at the Excel in London – which is vastly easier to get to these days, using the Elizabeth Line. It is the first time I’ve seen so many cosplayers in an audience, as keen and engaged with our discussion as everyone else. The signing session afterwards ran the gamut for me personally, from a reader of long standing getting their copies of earlier books signed and buying The Cleaving, to one who hadn’t came across my work before, buying The Cleaving after hearing me talk. So that’s a win all round.

Bristolcon was fun as always, both taking part in my panels and sitting in the audience for others. It was also a pleasure to spend time with established friends and to make/improve other acquaintance with like-minded folk. Being surrounded by people with shared interests and enthusiasms is one of the best things about SFF conventions. The reading I offered from The Green Man’s holiday was well received, so that’s sorted for World Fantasy.

And finally, I’d like to share this absolutely wonderful gift from Penny Hill, skilled needlewoman and expert on embroidery, fabrics and much more besides. If you’re at World Fantasy Convention 2025 more of her work will be in the art show, and I highly recommend you make time to see it – along with everything else.

Tomorrow I’ll be doing my World Fantasy panel prep and other such stuff.

I have two busy weekends ahead!

On Saturday 25th October,  I’m joining RJ Barker, Dan Coxon and Alex Pheby to discuss Dead Ink’s new non-fiction anthology of essays on Writing the Magic. Our panel is from 11am-11.45am at the Writers Block Stage, followed by a signing session from 11.45am-12.45am.

On Sunday 26th October, I’ll be at Bristolcon. After a reading at 12.50, I’ll join J A Mortimore, David Green, Jo M Thomas/Journeymouse, and Anna Smith Spark, to discuss Lost Cities and Legends at 1.00pm.

At 3.00pm, J E Hannaford, David Cartwright, Jonathan L. Howard, Carolyn Dougherty and I will consider possible solutions when Your planning application for a lair has been declined.

I’ll be arriving at the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton on Thursday 30th October. My schedule is as follows:

Friday, 3:00 pm-4:00 pm : Reading, with Ai Jiang and Christopher Caldwell

Friday, 7:00 pm-8:00 pm : Meet the Author: Juliet Mckenna. Sign up at the Registration Desk

Friday, 8:00 pm-10:00 pm : Mass Autograph Session. Feel free to say hello if you’re passing on your way to get something signed by another author

Saturday, 11:00 am-12:00 pm : Writing Fighting With Anna Smith Spark, Steve McHugh, Miles/Christian Cameron

Saturday, 3:00 pm-4:00 pm : Launch: Wizard’s Tower Press. Wizard’s Tower Press are launching my new novel, The Green Man’s Holiday, alongside Of the Emperor’s Kindness by Chaz Brenchley and Wiz Duo Book 3 by Ruthana Emrys & Andrew Knighton.

Saturday, 4:00 pm-5:00 pm : Launch: Dead Ink Books launch two new anthologies: Writing the Magic and Unquiet Guests.

I will also be attending the British Fantasy Awards and the Aldiss Award presentations, from 7.30pm on Saturday. The Green Man’s War is a finalist for the Best Fantasy Novel, and I have a story in Fight Like A Girl Volume 2, a finalist for Best Anthology.

I’ve mentioned the epic fantasy I’ve been working on for a while now, and promised more information in the fullness of time. That time is now!

The Riven Kingdom will be published by Angry Robot next year. The press release says:

Angry Robot Books has acquired Juliet E. McKenna’s The Riven Kingdom, described as a “fresh and gripping fantasy” that “blends politics, religion, and a battle for a dead king’s throne, perfect for fans of the Realm of the Elderlings series.”

Commissioned by editor Simon Spanton Walker, the one-book deal covers physical, ebook and audio.
“After devising a world with eerie, hidden magic and winding lethal intrigues around characters as new to me as they will be to readers, I’m thrilled to be working with Angry Robot to bring this story to fantasy fans,” says Juliet.

Simon Spanton Walker, commissioning editor, says: “Juliet writes involved and involving fantasy of the very highest order. The Riven Kingdom is no exception: a nuanced and gripping tale that uses fantasy to give vivid life to both the rulers and the ruled of a fantasy world in crisis. We’re incredibly proud to be her publisher.”

And Juliet’s agent, Max Edwards, adds: “Juliet E. McKenna is a legend among fantasy writers, and for good reason. The worlds she builds, the characters who populate them, and the challenges they face, are truly epic in their scope. After several years away from her heartland, it’s thrilling to see The Riven Kingdom re-inventing the epic fantasy for today’s world.”

So what’s the book about?

When King Venais is killed before he can marry and father an heir, the kingdom of Arafaze is thrown into uncertainty. His sister Princess Idelina, too grief-stricken to assert her claim to the throne, finds herself circled by those with ambitions of their own: Princess Alriad, the dead King’s aunt, seeks endorsement from the Sun Goddess’ high temple to rule as regent; Earl Padran and Earl Debin are determined to see the rightful succession secured; King Tadiri of neighbouring Mervante, whose daughter was set to marry the King, senses an opportunity.

As the kingdom splits into opposing factions, Jadewin, an experienced Moon Priestess, and Alory, a young Sun Priest, discover cliques within the temples and shrines betraying their vows to stay out of royal rivalries. Priests and priestesses defend this world against terrifying incursions from the intangible realm. Amid the upheavals of a war of succession, who knows what malevolent creatures might gain entry into their reality…

The Riven Kingdom is a high fantasy that explores the harsh realities of hereditary power in a world where knowledge of magic and the supernatural are secrets too dangerous to share.

We have a stupendous cover and I will share that as soon as I get the nod.

Taking a quick break from revising my new epic fantasy novel* to be published by Angry Robot next year, here’s some news to please keen readers.

The Green Man’s Holiday will be published by Wizard’s Tower Press on 30th October 2025, and ebook preorders are now open. Paper editions will be available for preorder soon. Check with your preferred retailer and/or find the full roster of purchase links at the Wizard’s Tower Press website.

Incidentally, if you would like to read some early excerpts, do check out Book Quote Wednesday #BookQW on social media. For me, that’s Bluesky, Mastodon, and Facebook. We get a word each week to look for in our books and share what we find. All authors are welcome to join in, so if you browse the hashtag, you’ll find a wide range of genres and writers.

*details about the new fantasy novel will be forthcoming in due course. I can say we now have a title we like very much, and an excellent cover concept. I am very pleased with the new facets added to the original story by the shifts in focus discussed and agreed after editorial input.

Once this rewrite is done, I’ll hopefully blog a bit more frequently…

I’m often asked, since I’m on the board of the Society of Authors, why legal action isn’t underway in the UK to hold the big tech companies to account for their wholesale and blatant breaches of copyright in using authors’ work scraped from pirate websites?

Well, for a start, class action lawsuits are much more difficult and complicated under English law than in the US. Even relatively straightforward cases can, and most likely will, take years to reach a conclusion and cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. Especially when the other side has more money to spend than many countries’ annual budgets, and every interest in finding procedural ways to drag things out, in order to exhaust the plaintiff’s financial and other resources.

What can make a significant difference to a defendant’s attitude to the threat of UK litigation, and indeed to the prospects for certifying a class action in the UK courts, are judgements elsewhere which have gone against them on the same grounds. This is why recent developments in the US are important, and not only for American authors.

Firstly –

“On Wednesday, July 16, bestselling author David Baldacci delivered powerful testimony before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, laying bare the devastating impact of AI companies’ systematic theft of copyrighted works. “I truly felt like someone had backed up a truck to my imagination and stolen everything I’d ever created,” Baldacci told the subcommittee, describing his discovery that AI companies had pirated his entire body of work to train their systems.
The moment of recognition came when Baldacci’s son asked ChatGPT to write a plot that read like a Baldacci novel. “In about five seconds, three pages came up that had elements of pretty much every book I’d ever written, including plot lines, character names, narrative, the works.”

You can read the full article here, and I recommend you do so.

Secondly –

“A California federal judge ruled Thursday that three authors suing Anthropic over copyright infringement can bring a class action lawsuit representing all U.S. writers whose work was allegedly downloaded from libraries of pirated works.
The filing alleges that Anthropic, the Amazon-backed OpenAI competitor behind the chatbot Claude, “violated the Copyright Act by doing Napster-style downloading of millions of works.” It alleges that the company downloaded as many as seven million copies of books from libraries of pirated works.”

Article here

We have to keep in mind this is a marathon, not a sprint. Frustrating as that is.

I’m looking forward to these autumn events, and discussing the fiction and non-fiction I’ve been working on with readers and fellow writers. And perhaps I’ll have more to share about future plans?

20th September – Edge Lit, Derby.

25th October – MCM Comic Con, London – I’ll be here on Saturday morning…

before hopping on a train to get to …

26th October – Bristolcon, Bristol

followed by …

30th October – 2nd November – World Fantasy Convention, Brighton UK

If our paths cross somewhere, feel free to say hello!

A brief and very pleasing bit of news today. I’m delighted to share Ben Baldwin’s fantastic cover, along with the title of the next book in my Green Man series.

The Green Man’s Holiday will be officially launched in October at the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton (with a sneak preview at Bristolcon).

Will Dan and Fin enjoy the relaxing break they’re hoping for? You’ll have to wait and see…

I hadn’t planned on a six month blogging hiatus. So what happened?

On the plus side, over the Christmas and New Year break, I found the ideas I had for the next Green Man book were coming together in new and interesting ways. As soon as the holiday was over, I started writing, and I kept on writing. After illness and other upheavals wreaked havoc with my work schedule last year, I was determined to get as much of the new book done as soon as I could, in case anything unexpected happened. I pretty much assumed it would.

I’m happy to say no crisis hit. I got the draft written fast and fluently. With the benefit of editor Toby Selwyn’s invaluable input, we now have the finished manuscript, ready well ahead of the book’s planned launch at the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton at the end of October. Ben Baldwin has now worked his usual magic and given us a marvellous cover. Details will forthcoming soon.

Other things in the plus column include me contributing an essay to the creative writing handbook, Writing the Magic, edited by Dan Coxon. I decided to explore what Tolkien’s creative process could offer a writer today – and where following in his footsteps might not be the best idea. That was an interesting and illuminating exercise on many levels. And talking of Tolkien, Zen Cho’s memorial lecture on fantasy fiction was as entertaining as it was instructive, and is well worth a watch.

I have also been working with the team at Angry Robot to agree on some changes to a fantasy novel proposal. That was one of the other projects that got badly disrupted last year. We have reached an entirely satisfactory consensus, and signed the contract. That book will be published next year, and when I read the opening few pages at Eastercon, people were pleasingly intrigued.

As an aside, some people have been surprised when I’ve mentioned I’m reworking a novel to a fairly significant extent following editorial input on my proposal. I’m surprised that they are surprised. It’s not the first time I’ve done this after all, going right back to my early Tales of Einarinn days. Fresh eyes, especially experienced, professional eyes, can offer valuable new input at every stage of a book’s development. I’m simply telling the story I want to tell from a slightly different perspective. Shifting the focus on certain characters, and rebalancing different plot elements, is proving to be an enjoyable challenge.

So I have been busy, and not only with writing. I was re-elected to the board of the Society of Authors last autumn, and we have been extremely busy. The onslaught on copyright law led by tech companies, hell bent on monetising their parasitical Large Language Models, has only been our most high profile challenge. A whole lot of things are making life difficult for writers at present, from the fragmentation and degradation of social media to bad practise and sheer incompetence by some publishers. You’ll notice I’m not naming names or mentioning specifics. I have a duty of confidentiality to the Society and its membership. That precludes me blogging about the publishing industry outrage of the day/week. Even without that, I haven’t had time to spare to get into debating and exploring the details of extremely complex situations.

Then there’s the ongoing everything else; in society, in politics, in the climate crisis, and international affairs. You don’t need me to tell you we live in perilous and unhappy times. I’ve balanced keeping current with the news with not letting it overwhelm me, which has meant spending less time online. Yes, I absolutely recognise the social and financial privilege I have which allows me to do that. I use that privilege where and when I can, to do what I can, mostly offline. Then there’s been family stuff; nothing dire, I’m glad to say, but everything takes up time. All this has added up to me limiting my social media to Bluesky, Mastodon and Facebook, disinclined to post longer form blogs, even about unrelated things.

So what has changed? Mostly, I’ve got the new Green Man book completed without a crisis. This time last year, I was scrabbling to get back on track, still recovering from a serious illness. Currently, I’m ahead of the game. I realised this when I looked at the calendar this morning. Don’t ask me why, but that flipped some sort of switch. Today was the day to dust off the blog.

Today sees Different Times and Other Places, my retrospective short fiction collection, published by Newcon Press. This is the latest in their Polestars series showcasing writers working across speculative fiction – who happen to be women. Selecting these stories has offered me insights into my development as a writer, as well as highlighting inspirations which I realise go back to my earliest reading. It has also given me the opportunity to share two completely new, previously unpublished stories. The Green Man’s Guest sees an unexpected encounter for Dan Mackmain in an arboretum, while A Stitch in Time Saves One explores an epic fantasy possibility that occurred to me and was simply too good not to use somewhere.

The only downside of putting this collection together – if I can even call it that – is I find I want to write more and longer stories about the people and places I have revisited. My natural writing length is the novel. Writing short stories is a skill I have consciously learned. It’s a distinctly different narrative form which I have come to appreciate, not least by reading the work of other authors who do this supremely well. Writing really good, effective short fiction absolutely isn’t simply a case of fitting a story into the required word count.

My first novel, The Thief’s Gamble, was an epic fantasy, a genre I still read and enjoy. I often come across potential inspirations for fresh ways of looking at magic, and of reflecting on our own lives using the magic mirror of a previously unimagined secondary world. These days, short stories allow me to explore these ideas in between writing my ongoing Green Man series of contemporary fantasy novels. And since a short story asks far less of a reader’s time, they are an excellent way to offer an introduction to my style and perspective as an author.

I don’t ever want to become complacent as a writer, so I continually strive to hone my skills. The best way to improve your abilities in any craft is to tackle new tests. That’s something else I get from short fiction. Writing for a themed anthology is an intriguing creative challenge as I look for an angle that no one else has seen. Then I get to read everyone else’s stories, and see the other possibilities they found. In Fight Like A Girl Volume 2, from Wizard’s Tower Press, it’s great to see so many authors from the first volume returning, as well as the contributions from other writers joining us. It’s very rewarding to see readers enjoying the breadth of perspectives this anthology offers.

Shared-world writing asks similar and also different questions of an author, as a group of writers work together to find the balance between individuality and collaboration that creates a coherent setting which becomes more than the sum of its parts. I contributed the story ‘Unseen Hands’ to the Ampyrium anthology from ZNB in the summer, working with and alongside a great roster of writers to build this new and original milieu.

February 2025 will see the publication of the Lincolnshire Folk Tales Reimagined anthology. This was a different writing challenge yet again. The team behind the ‘Lincolnshire Folk Tales: Origins, Legacies, Connections, Futures’ project at Nottingham Trent University are putting together a programme of launch events, which will include readings, Q&A and more, to promote interest and awareness of the origins and influences of this storytelling heritage. Check this page for the dates and places for events – you’ll need to scroll down for the newest additions.

And now? I’ll get back to working on a new, full-length project that I’m developing, alongside Dan’s next adventure…