This week’s post was going to be on leakage and how writing several series at once inevitably (if you’re me) leads to a certain level of cross-fertilisation. But that’s going ot have to wait, because this week’s been Busy McBusy.

The Black Mausoleum has finished it’s penultimate rewrite. One more to go – spit and polish and scrub up the fine details of the words. Another one I’m pleased with and that’ll go to my editor around Easter.

I’ve now got the editorial rewite of The Warlock’s Shadow in front of me, which is going to be the biggest rewrite I’ve had to do after a submission. I don’t know quite how it’s possible to write a story and read thorugh it several times and be quite sure you’ve written something good, only to have a series of flaws pointed out that largely amount to having forgotten to put the story into the second half of the book. OK, it’s quite not as bad as that makes it sound, but I do feel like I’ve got a very pretty looking corpse in front of me that is somehow missing its spine.

All of which mean’s The King’s Assassin, which was coming along nicely, has gone into suspended animation pending the outcome of surgery, just to make sure there aren’t any characters central to the plot who suddenly aren’t there any more. Yes, this can happen.

However, most of what’s been keeping me busy these last few days has been storyboarding. Storyboarding, storyboarding and more storyboarding. Partly that’s been for the next dragon book, current working title The Prince of Swords. A lot has been on something new. Yes, an entirely new top secret hush hush project.

More details will follow shortly. In the meantime, for anyone interested, those clever chaps at the Functional nerds were kind enough to ask me to podcast with them, so if you want to listen to me pontificate about covers, bookshops, dragons and which classic eighties fantasy series had a real let-down of an ending, go listen here.