At least you'll never be a vegetable - even artichokes have hearts

Due to having been selected by a top secret government agency to do something that I can't tell you about, I'm going away for a while. I am however--much like the gnome in Amelie, or Faye L Booth's touring copy of Cover The Mirrors--going to be sending missives of my travels onto Ms Whiteley (what I mean is, I know they didn't send missives to Aliya, but, well, you get the gist.

She has decided, in her wisdom, to share them with you on this here blog. This all has the added benefit that I get to post a pic of the lovely Audrey Tautou here. So everyone's a winner.

And before I head off, here I am going off on one on Windsor's Beat (thanks to Melanie Gow for inviting to contribute), and also discussing the art of how writers with day jobs 'keep it together', over Sam's blog. Both pieces carry a picture of me in a jumper, which seems a bit perverse seeing's as it's about 2 billion degrees in the shade in these parts at the moment.

So, for now, in the words of Ms Tautou, 'au revoir'.

Dick, Jane and the Beatniks, man

Lavie Tidhar, he of travelling and science fiction short story fame (he has the lead story in the current issue of Interzone), quite some time back commissioned a load of stories for his Dick & Jane Primer for Adults. The stories come from folks like Adam Roberts, Conrad Williams, James Lovegrove, and son. There's an absolutely cracking story from Liz Williams and, yes, this isn't all about the altruism as there's a story from me in there too. Well, it is finally be published, in June, but only available to members of the British Fantasy Society. I'm assuming it will be mailing out with Prism, their magazine.

In other news, it looks like back in August of last year, hepcat online litzine the Beat published one of my stories. They may have told me about it, but if they did, I forgot. You can read it for free anyway, and it's quite good. It's called The Flautist.