If you’re anything like me, you’re sick to death (but, like, figuratively; upon contemplation that particular metaphor might be a bit too on-the-nose) of all this global pandemic whatsits. Quarantine this, lockdown that, lots of people dying, empty shelves, &c. Perhaps you’re hoping for a distraction that’ll take your mind off things?

That was actually a terrible lead-in, because honestly Quarantine Quest is not, in fact, all that dissimilar from reality at this point. I mean, it’s a little dissimilar, but not in the way that lead-in implies.

Honestly, I’m not dealing very well with all this. My routine’s hardly changed, but… well. The whole situation is affecting me far worse than I would’ve guessed. So I’ve been trying to manage my stress proactively wherever possible, taking on as little as possible, taking the chance to rest, &c., which is also a terrible lead-in because somehow I ended up taking…

A good deal later than usual, but still in good time for the holidays, this year’s FFM collection is finally finished!

Shiny!

Phoenix might be the best of these yet, though it’s hard to say. It’s hard to even put it in the same category as the others: most of the stories in Phoenix are interconnected, making it more like a mosaic novelette interspersed with unrelated shenanigans than a collection of individual stories. But that overarching story is one I’m pretty well proud of, for more reasons than one. I think it’s worth reading!

Also, it’s got a lot of space faeries in.

This is an old sketch from school days that I happened to have scanned. You can see the layers of lines built up as I felt around for the shape I wanted and then started to nail down the ones that landed where I wanted them.

When I was in fourth-year architecture, I took an elective course in multidimensional geometry. (Yes, I did this on purpose. It was a great course.)

In the opening lecture, the professor stood at the front of the class and asked us whether anyone could imagine an equilateral triangle with three right angles in it. Nobody could – it breaks all the rules about what triangles are. He then threw a transparency on the overhead (this was 1995 – ask your parents if you have no idea what an overhead was) that contained an image of the earth – a line was drawn along one…

Ten Little Astronauts has now been published and is available for sale – no pledging, no pre-ordering – anywhere you might reasonably expect to buy books! Readers who supported Unbound’s crowdfunding campaign started getting their copies yesterday.

If you’ve got one yourself, please do share a photo – I’m putting together a Twitter moment featuring as many as I can find:

The book is available in a whole bunch of places I’ll be adding to its page on this site as I discover them, but for now your main options are:

Waterstones

Amazon UK

Amazon US

Barnes & Noble

Kobo

Alternatively you should be able to quite simply walk into a bookshop and ask for it. I’m not sure how many places will stock it right off the bat like this, but any of them should…

Things are really moving along with Ten Little Astronauts, and the book is expected to release on December 13th: less than a month from now!

There’s more information about this over on Unbound, but since the people reading here are probably familiar with my work beyond this one book, I’d like to focus on something else entirely and ask if you could do me a massive, massive favour.

I don’t normally go chasing people for reviews, which is probably part of the reason my books don’t have many. However, with Ten Little Astronauts set to go off to the printers any day now, it’s likely that a fair number of new readers will come across my older work and I’d like for it to make a good impression when they do.