Ethereal Tales issue 6, featuring new short stories by Rebecca J Payne and Naomi Clark, is out now! You can buy the issue direct from Cute N Creey at http://www.etherealtales.co.uk/ for only £2.50.

The last month has been a little crazy on the day-job front, but I finally got around to posting this, my first sale - a short story in the new anthology "The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder and Evolution".

"Hopeful Monsters: A Darwinian Fairytale" puts a twist on the traditional oral tale, by retelling it from an evolutionary perspective. No Big Bad Wolf here, just natural selection!

Buy the book Lulu.com (ebook) - POD paperback coming soon!

Other formats are in the pipeline and should be coming along very soon, and it has gone to the printers.  So it should be available in print in about a fortnight.

All profits from this anthology will be donated to the Lambda Legal Defense to support their fight for marriage equality for all.  So if you buy this anthology, you won't only get a great read, you'll also be doing a good deed  

It's a good hefty volume.  Nearly 100K long, containing 22 stories from authors ranging from the well known - like James Buchanan - to newly discovered rising stars - like D.C Juris.  And as part of the team who chose the stories, I can vouch that every single one of them is good.

My contribution is called Inner Truth, which is a glimpse at the happy ending of John and Alfie from False Colors, but told through the eyes of one Joe Malley who has his own problems:

Naomi Clark and Rebecca J Payne will each have a short story in the upcoming January issue of Ethereal Tales.

Woe! Woe is me! For the first time in my life my precious, heartfelt words are out there in the big bad wide world and - ouch! What are you doing, firing such barbed arrows into my heart? Oh you scoundrel, how can you not like the story I slaved for months over, you must be a heartless beast, or at the very least, an idiot who didn't see the subtext that was staring you in the face...

I should have posted this ages ago! But since it's now less than a month until AFTERLIFE is released, I now have my butt in gear.

AFTERLIFE will be available from Damnation Books on 1st December.

Interzone #225 has gone to print featuring my short story "By Starlight". The issue will hit bookshop shelves and subscribers' doorsteps on 12 November.

FantasyCon was held at the Britannia Hotel in Nottingham again this year, from Friday 18th to Sunday 20th September. There were about 270 attendees, plus special guests - a good size for someone like myself who is just dipping a toe in the convention water (it was only my second "real" SF&F con, not counting RPG cons that I used to go back in the day).

A few months ago I had the pleasure of visiting Amsterdam for a weekend, primarily to see an old friend and also to look around the Colours of Night exhibition in the Van Gough museum. Unafraid as I was of looking quite obviously like a tourist by wandering around the city centre with a large map, I saw a strange cluster of looping streets like concentric horseshoes peeling away from one of the main canals, a swirling fingerprint in the heart of the city. "That's the Nine Streets district," my friend informed me, "where all the independent shops and artists are." Nine Streets? It all sounded rather... hellish to me, not out of any particular aversion to boutiques selling overpriced vintage clothing or conceptual artists, but because I'd recently been delving into Dante's Divine Comedy.