I quipped to a friend recently that my March workload, if not my public appearance schedule, is following me into April. I was so busy last month I barely had time to talk about things as they happened – I only managed quick posts about the WOW Festival and University of Notre Dame appearances. I can report that the North London Lit Fest was also rather wonderful: after ninety minutes of conversation there was a further hour of recorded interviews with Aliette de Bodard and myself, mostly intended to be a resource for students but which will also (I think) crop up in promos for next year’s Lit Fest. I also had a great time at the HOLDFAST anthology launch party, where I did a somewhat guerilla reading from Regeneration to a very appreciative audience. In between I attended Farah Mendlesohn’s intriguing BSFA interview with fabulist and poet Suniti Namjoshi, and finally made it to a session of the Super Relaxed Fantasy Club, where I got to drink wine, listen to readings, and have no responsibilities whatsoever.

That lasted for all of a day. Binary is now out in the UK in paperback (does a happy dance), and in honour of the occasion I was invited to guest post by a couple of bloggers who admire my books. Asking the Next Question is about the challenge, and the opportunity, of writing an unplanned sequel; while it deals specifically with how I took the Gemsigns story forward into Binary, I think it has a more general relevance. Plausible Fictions and Strange Realities grew out of a conversation I had at Loncon; it talks about what types of speculation readers find easier to accept, and how much of that is down to a greater comfort level with simply seeing more of what we’ve seen before. Anyone with a passing interest in the vexed question of what constitutes ‘real’ SF might find it worth their while. And with Binary out in the US in exactly a month (yikes!), I’ve also written a post to coincide with that. I won’t pre-empt mine host by telling you where it’ll appear or what it’s about, but it is rather fun …

I was very honoured to have been asked last year to be one of the judges for the 2015 James White Award, but I didn’t want to announce it ahead of the organisers doing so. And there were delays on their end for various reasons, not least because, despite a submissions period of over six months, the majority of the 255 submissions were received in the final two weeks. That made winnowing them down into a shortlist a frankly mammoth task; but they got there in the end, and Dave Hutchinson and Gareth Powell and I read and deliberated, and a winner has been chosen. The announcement is traditionally made alongside the BSFA Awards, so I expect you’ll hear the news on that one this very evening.

Rereading the above I truly don’t know how it’s been possible, but I have also, since finishing Regeneration structural edits, written a short story (which turned out to be rather less short than I anticipated). It’s for a Jo Fletcher Books’ Secret Project and I finished it yesterday, which means I don’t actually know what I think about it yet. But I won’t have time to think about it at all for a while, because *sigh* Regeneration copy edits are back, and there are still a couple of character and plot elements that need tweaking, and with the July pub date just around the corner in delivery terms there’s no time to waste; so this entire post has really been a long-winded way of saying I’m diving back into the black hole of editing for a couple of weeks. See you on the other side.