Down the Steely Aja/Gaucho outtake rabbit hole:

 How good is this? I mean, seriously. They rejected this?

A Star Trek thing, a Sparks thing and another Star Trek thing.

 Just a heads up to let you know that there's a nice, three-page interview with me in the current issue of Star Trek Explorer magazine (issue 2 of the relaunched mag), in which I talk about my love of classic Trek and some favorite episodes, among other things. Thanks to Nick and Mark for the interview, which I greatly enjoyed doing.

In other news, over the last few months I've found myself going down the Sparks rabbit hole. I've always liked Sparks as an idea, but haven't actually owned any of their records - until now. I didn't want to rush into it with these flash-in-the-pan acts.

Here's the splendid video for a great Sparks song from 1994:

But - hey - there's a Star Trek connection in this video, and rather a fun one. Can you figure it out? Form an orderly queue with your answers. (And no, that's not a Q reference).

Eversion approaches

 Eversion will be out in a couple of weeks in the UK, and I've already seen my author copies. It looks very nice, with a distinctly different design to my other titles.

Some early reviews have begun to appear. Writing in the Daily Mail, Jamie Buxton called it "gripping, exciting and clever, as well as a deeply moving story about truth, sacrifice and how to be human."

In New Scientist, Sally Adee wrote: "it isn't every day you get to experience a perfect collision of the Romantic macabre of Edgar Allan Poe and HP Lovecraft with The Usual Suspects and 2001: A Space Odyssey."

Finally, writing in The Guardian, Lisa Tuttle called it a "wonderfully entertaining puzzle wrapped inside an adventure story, which turns out to be science fictional after all."

Notes and sketches for the Revenger books

 In the comments to the last post, it was asked if I had any more detailed information on the timeline for the Congregation, as featured in the Revenger series.

I do have some more information on various aspects of that universe, in the form of notes and drawings done for my benefit while writing the books. These were never intended for publication, just as memory aids, and in some respects represent earlier drafts of names and characters compared to how they eventually appeared. Now that the dust has settled, though, I thought it wouldn't hurt to put them up here.

I'm going to present these scans without comment as they should be self-explanatory to those who have read the books. However, if there's anything that's not clear, please feel free to comment and I'll try to shed light. The timeline is right at the bottom.