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.