Richard [K] Morgan's News and Views

Formal notice: the Great January Sale in February and March will end at midnight GMT on Sunday March 29th. Payments received before that deadline will be processed and the books sent out. Anything after that, I'm afraid, will fall into the void.

The sale has been a great success - I now have the novel experience of being able to move from one side of my office to another without tripping over a pile of books or a cardboard box. So many thanks to all who took part - we must do this again sometime - in another seven years, say, when my piles of author copies have once more built up to skyscraper proportions.

And like the bulk of those author copies, I also will soon be Gone - to the other side of the world for a taste of Australian fandom and a country I have been itching to see for what feels like forever. The curious thing is, the Land of Oz has always seemed slightly mythical to me - yeah, sure, I know it has to exist because I keep meeting people who come from there (eg. my brother-in-law) and besides you can see it in the atlases and the history books. But somehow, the concept of a place that's eight thousand miles away through the ground beneath my feet just has a completely fantastical ring to it. As do things like the duck billed platypus and the kangaroo. I mean - an upright, bouncing rat as tall as a man? Come on! Sounds like something out of the Mos Eisley spaceport bar. In fact, I still remember talking to an Australian EFL colleague in Istanbul who told me that in her house back home, you could get up in the morning, go into the kitchen to make coffee and see the kangaroos grazing in the back garden - it was at that point I suddenly realised that at some visceral level I didn't really believe in kangaroos; not the same way I believed in sheep or tigers or elephants - there was just something too strange, too otherwordly about the idea of them really being there, crouched down and grazing right outside the kitchen window.

Well - going to get that perception gap sorted out pretty sharpish. For those of you already over there in the mythical land of Oz, I'll be joining you, first in Perth, the City of Lights (there you go, another wholly fantastical concept - a city in splendid geographical isolation turning its porch lights on to greet an orbiting astronaut as the darkened globe turns and he passes overhead) from April 8th to 13th, and thereafter during May in Melbourne, Hobart, Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane, details to follow.

See you there!

Yes - some of you will probably have already noticed that The Cold Commands has surreptitiously changed its name to The Dark Commands, and is also now showing a UK publication date in mid-2010.

Sad but true. On both counts.

The title change alone is a big disappointment for me - I loved the alliteration of the thing (my London editor's idea, curse him, not mine), and the thematic implications. But unfortunately, the way the narrative is unfolding there's nothing remotely cold about any of it; worse still, there are a number of components that have fairly demolished any hope of using any title containing the word cold.

Dark, on the other hand..... Well - you know me by now.

I'm also pretty pissed off - with myself - about the publication push-back, but there's not a lot to be done about that either. Basically, I've spent the last year trying to kick start the second narrative for Ringil and Co, and the process has been fascinating and frustrating in about equal measures.

See, I'd always talked a good fight about making each book in this trilogy a self contained novel, but it wasn't until quite recently that I realised how deeply satisfied I was with the ending of The Steel Remains. Sure, there are loose ends, but when wasn't that true of one of my books? But my characters all ended up where I wanted them to be, they bedded down into the consequences and outcomes of what they'd seen and done with the pleasing clunk of emotional deadbolts falling into place - so rolling them all out of bed again, splashing water on their faces and getting them to open up and let in the morning light has proved a lot more problematic than I'd expected. I started at least twice and then had to tear up what I'd written because it was some weak-assed shit. Worse still, when I did finally get onto what felt like the right track, it involved at least a couple of scenes that I really didn't want to write. If you guys thought The Steel Remains was brutal, you ain't seen nothing yet.

And won't see it for a while yet, either. Sorry about that.

These scheduling issues are further complicated by the fact that I'm off to Australia in April and will be there for a couple of months, doing bookshop signings, SF club appearances and general publicity in Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane and Tasmania, and kicking off with a Guest of Honour gig at SwanCon 09 in Perth (oh, okay, yes, alright, and having some serious antipodean downtime along the way). I'll post details of those gigs later in the month as my publishers in Oz and I get them thrashed out. Meantime, you can get more on SwanCon from their website which is here.

And back here in Scotland, the great January sale in February has spilled over into March. It should run for at least a couple more weeks. There's an update on what stuff I've got left posted in Comments on the original entry, so if you're still looking for something, check it out or drop me a mail. I'll be locking up the store before I head out to SwanCon, so there's not a lot of time left, but until I serve notice of that, it's safe to assume we're still rolling.