Now the end of the summer is in sight, it's time to make some plans to hit the road again - and as a bi-product Cities of the Dead II is coming together without even having to plan it.
Stop number one is Bucharest in mid-October. I always thought the first time I would hit Romania would be related to the Big Bear Rescue project but apparently not - this one is going to be the City Experience... and it looks like my kind of place:
And then there's this library that I must investigate. If library's looked like this over here, maybe we wouldn't want to shut them all down. Alas, a spot of laminate floor and some white paint is too much to ask...
A few weeks later, I will be making what has become an annual trip to Florence where there will be lots of work to do, but never so much that you can't take some hours to wander in the footsteps of real legends.
Those are quite enough plans for now.
Later today - because a Bank Holiday weekend is a good time to do such things - the final-ish draft of The Family Of Noise is being shipped off to be made into an uncorrected proof. That's what happens to books in the real world and therefore, is what's also happening here. You shouldn't skimp on this part of the equation. If you do, this is the point where bad shit happens and nobody wants to be haunted by that sort of thing when you're building an Empire.
It feels great (read: fucking wonderful) to have things moving again. In fact, 'moving' could be something of an understatement... for the curious, here is the provisional contents listing for Almost Human (a second collection of short stories if you haven't been paying attention):
There may be some others knocking about in errant notebooks too, so there could well be more than this inside when it finally hits the racks. One step at a time...
Once these two books (Cities II won't be this year unless I win some kind of 'around the world in 18 minutes' golden ticket kind of thing) are looking like they are capable of walking home from school by themselves, I'm going to jump tracks and focus on pulling together the songs I've started writing for Deadbirds.
It sure sounds like a good way to spend most of the weeks heading up to and around Christmas anyway.