New book delivered

 A few hours ago I hit send on my next book, provisionally entitled MERLIN'S WAY. It's the one I've been talking about for some time, a gathering-up of the four "Merlin" novellas I wrote over about twenty years. But, it's ended up being something more than that. My original plan had been to stitch together the stories with a bit of linking material, and maybe rejig the chronologically-final piece a little to smooth over some bumps in point of view. The more I worked on the project, though, the more I realised that nothing about it was going to be simple, and that constructing a satisfactory book-length narrative was going to involve a far more radical recasting of the original material than I'd ever imagined at the outset. There were huge aspects of the original Merlin sequence that no longer played well for me, meaning that I had to take a step back from the whole enterprise and rethink some of the assumptions, including the backstory of Merlin's quest, against which the earlier stories functioned as independent adventures en-route to a larger goal. The process of re-investing myself in the material required throwing out some ideas and introducing new ones, which in itself proved far more challenging than initially envisaged. The resultant book contains at least as much new material as old, and proceeds to a different conclusion than the original sequence. In my head, I've taken to thinking of it as a Merlin smoothie, pouring the four stories into a blender, while tipping in lots of new ingredients. Hopefully the result is nutritious and flavoursome, rather than an amorphous gooey mess, but as of this evening I'm almost certainly the person least qualified to have an objective opinion on the matter.

Because I've been absolutely heads-down on this for months, I've not been great at updating the blog. If it's not too late, and you're in the area, I'd like to mention that I'll be speaking this Friday, September 12th, at the Birmingham Science Fiction Group. All the relevant details are below:

Come along if you have a chance, and ask me about Merlin, Halcyon Years, whatever you like. If there's time, I'll be happy to grab a drink afterwards.

I'll resume my fundraising drive in the next post, but in the meantime thank you to all who have already supported my Cardiff Half Marathon initiative for Cancer Research Wales. Deeply appreciated.

Cheers,

Al