Excuses, excuses ...

Um. Yeah. Okay. According to the proper order of things, the Bond-a-thon should notched up another entry today with ‘For Your Eyes Only’. I should also, by now, have watched and reviewed the latest LoveFilm title (‘I’m Not There’) and penned a little something on ‘Scott Pilgrim vs the World’ (picked up dirt cheap a couple of weeks ago).

However, my film watching has plummeted in the last week or so. Several reasons: I’ve been reading a friend’s manuscript (crime novel: pretty damn good so far), my sister-in-law has got engaged, work has been doing its best to excise the proverbial pound of flesh from me, and – somehow – I’ve been on a roll with the short fiction. In less than a fortnight, I’ve completed two short stories (‘The Chamber’ and ‘The Assimilation Device’), one piece of flash fiction (‘The God Particle’, inspired by the Higgs Boson coverage and with a tip of the hat to Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’; you can read it here), and made inroads to the tune of 2,000 words into something that is worryingly urging me to consider it as a novella.

So: please bear with me. I’ll be unholstering my Walther PPK and checking in with Q branch at the weekend; expect some 007 early next week. In the meantime, I’ve started a new blog with a purely pictorial aesthetic, celebrating pulp book covers (mainly sci-fi) – it’s called Seduced By Starlight (classy, no?) and you can check it out here.