After all the excitement and online attention of the last couple of weeks, and the turmoil of the past half-year or so, it’s time to get back to something approaching normal. I actually can’t remember the last time I spent a day, much less a week or a month, simply writing fiction. But I’ve just checked back through my list of other-things-to-do and to my relief, they’ve all been done. Guest posts and articles have been written, interviews have been given, and all are now online. Reviews for Gemsigns and Binary continue to come in at a steady rate, and I will continue to link them here. But increasingly those reviewers and interviewers (not to mention regular readers) are also asking how the third book of the ®Evolution, Gillung, is coming along, and the answer is that it mostly hasn’t been; I’ve been hugely distracted for many months now. The manuscript isn’t just a little bit late, it’s very late. But the story is there in my head, scrabbling to get out, growling at me for some undivided attention.

So that’s what it’s about to get. It’ll be another complicated, layered story with a large cast of characters, and if I’m to give it the kind of focus that demands I can’t allow my mind to wander. I’m going to try out one of those apps that’s supposed to help eliminate the distractions of the web (I’m looking at you here, Twitter). I won’t be completely absent, but I will be less immediately responsive. I’m not going to be saying ‘no’ to all new requests, but I may no longer be saying ‘yes’ to everything in the way that I have done. As it is I’ve still got loads of appearances, real and virtual, coming up: in a week I’ll be recording a Skiffy and Fanty roundtable discussion with other Caribbean SF writers for podcast shortly thereafter. A couple of days after that I head to Jamaica, where I’ll be reading at the Calabash Literary Festival on 31st May. When I get back I’ll be the BSFA’s interviewee on 25th June, and I’ve made myself available for Independent Booksellers Week which starts on the 28th, and then in August there’s Nine Worlds and the World Science Fiction Convention. I doubt I’ll be finished by then, but with any luck the end will at least be in sight.