Dispatch dated 19th Sep 2003

Whatever Next? [ Downs Lord Triptych / The Two Confessions / Amy-Faith & the Stronghold]

Other Synopses

Own-trumpet voluntary

Interview

A Hymn to Merrily

Books Wanted

As a historian...

Favourite links

Contact the author

Dispatch dated 29th January 2005

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A belated Happy New Year to all JAW readers and apologies for the hiatus in site updates.

The main reason for that web passivity is commitments on the writing front - which for an author should constitute full excuse.

Recent JAW publications include my short story 'THE SUNKEN GARDEN' in the Ash-Tree Press anthology 'ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT', published December 2004 ( hardback ISBN 1-55310-075-1, paperback 1-55310-076-X ). Therein an elderly Methodist minister 'enjoys' a memorable Golden Wedding anniversary celebration and makes the trip of a lifetime - in the sense he ain't coming back.

Also, there's been two JAW SFX magazine interviews, one with ace English author Phil Rickman (see A hymn to merrily), and another with 'The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant' creator, Stephen Donaldson. He was in the UK to promote his twenty years delayed return to the series ( 'The Runes of the Earth' ) and we met up for a enjoyable chat in a Covent Garden hotel.

See SFX issues 124, December 2004, and 127, February 2005, respectively.

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Current projects underway include:

BABYLONdon. Research, a detailed synopsis and 12,000 words to date, on a novel set in the anti-Catholic ( and then anti-authority ) Gordon Riots in 1780. A book broadly similar to my long considered CHAOS & CATHOLICKS ( see Other Synopses ). Its hero is the diminutive and dapper Cavaliere, concerning whom there is both more and less than meets the eye ... Vying with him for star status in the book is uproarious 18th century London itself.

FRANKENSTEIN'S LEGIONS. A novel extrapolating the events of Mary Shelley's classic novel into the 1840s. Revival of the dead is now commonplace, though desperately harmful to the social fabric of the nations involved. An otherwise exhausted France promiscuously recycles its dead soldiery to prosecute the Napoleonic Wars into their fifth decade in a devastated Europe, and those allied against her must reluctantly fall into line to augment their own forces. Principle characters include Julius Frankenstein ( nephew of the Frankenstein ) an exile in England, and Lady Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron and patron of Charles Babbage, inventor of 'The Difference Engine'. The book has been commissioned by a games company developing a computer game of the same name.

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And finally, I have a new agent, the redoubtable John Jarrold, who also commissioned and published four of my earlier books ! Full details available for perusal at: http://www.sff.net/people/john-jarrold/press.html

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