It's been a long year - I figured it might be time to kick back for a week to regroup a little, so after the Manchester Show last weekend (which was superb, thanks for asking) we headed out for North Wales in search of some kind of downtime. Thus, in a week that contained a castle, a crazy bookshop, a TARDIS on a pier, some cable cars, a river, a horse-drawn canal boat, a big old Roman city and some extreme head space, I also found some time to slot in a spot of research in the shape of a trip to a certain house which features rather heavily in Turn The Lamp Down Low. I'm still not sure whether to name it as being the actual venue of events (in or out of the book) but it's a pretty big deal to have the colour and the shape of the 'main character' fleshed out in their entirety before I go any further. It's been more than twenty years since I last visited 'the house'. Much has changed and yet, nothing has changed.

That's the way everything should be in life.

In amongst all of this, we managed to squeeze in a major family meal for 16 estranged people. We've had it on the table for almost a year now and you have to love it when a plan comes together. I think living rather a lot of life online can make you appreciate what life offline used to be like if you're of the mind to look at it that way. I got it into my head that it would be wrong for the next time we all saw each other to be at another funeral.

Take a look around. It's easy to fix if you find yourself in a similar situation. A phone call and a couple of emails is all it takes - and it was one of the best nights I've had in quite some time. It's good to see that despite far too many years disappearing under the bridge that everybody remains much the same. Like I said: Much has changed and yet, nothing has.

•••

Over the past weekend, I picked up a copy of Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce. I read a tiny little review of it somewhere and figured I would give it a shot. Sometimes a book comes along that gives you a good kick in the ass just to remind you of a few things. Not in the way that those monsters like Jonathan Strange or Imajica did (for they are the Olympians that sit on the top of the mountain for me), but one that reminds you to be as consistently great as possible. To say it's easily the best book I've read this year so far would not be a lie.

From start to finish, it's absolutely captivating - I don't think I've ever read anything quite like it. When a young girl appears back at the family home after being missing for twenty years and swears on her life that it was the fairies that took her away, the book had better go one way (a full on children's fantasy) or the other (a magical journey into the dark side of the human psyche) in the most bombastic way possible and it's the latter of these paths that Joyce finds himself on. Give it a whirl. I've been telling everybody that cares to listen about it - there's no disappointment to be found here. It's truly beautiful. Beautiful enough for me to track down a copy of The Tooth Fairy by Joyce which has to be worth a damn.

I might even be ever so slightly jealous and that doesn't happen very often at all...

•••

As is always the way with my holidays, I come back with a head more full of ideas and concepts than when I left. This trip has been no exception. What I didn't expect was to find that somebody somewhere had tracked down my trial run of August Moon's first instalment - The Monster Magnet - and, better still, publicly say nice things about it. As soon as I've mastered the artwork for the covers, it appears it might be time to make the old beast public again and finally commit to the schedule I'd set up for it.

More later... lots of catching up to do.