Guess Who’s Back-back-back. Back Again-gain-gain.

Hi, everybody!

So I’m back. Successfully married, finger be-ringed, and lovely fiancee has seamlessly morphed into lovely wife. And after a week in scorching 35C/100F degree sunshine on our honeymoon, I am… slightly tanned!

(Nothing makes me more obviously Welsh than my skin. We… we don’t tan. As a race.)

Tanned — Me, after a sunny two-week holiday, as tanned as I ever am. Note the skin-tone now matches a normal Caucasian male.

What does this mean? Well, it means we’re on the home straight to the release of my first novel, the book I’ve been rambling about for months, ASCENSION POINT. And – like Usain Bolt crushing the anchor leg of the 4x100m relay to complete his double-triple goldmedalathon – I’m going to make it a good one.

There are some edits from wedding-best-man-and-beta-reader Steve which I need to apply, and then it’s off to the folks at RedAdept Publishing for a professional spit-and-polish/complete carve-up and rewrite. And then… PUBLICATION.

So that’s all very exciting. What else has happened? I somehow acquired ten more Twitter followers despite not tweeting for three weeks, which was part baffling, part cool. I watched a lot of Olympics (go Team GB!) and reread the first seven of Steven Erikson’s Malazan books, and the first three of Ian C. Esslemont’s, in the correct reading order. (Thanks Wert.)

I’m on Toll the Hounds now, which might actually be my favourite of the lot, even though almost nothing happens for the first 200 pages. Maybe because of that. It’s all snappy dialogue and philosophical expostulation, which normally rubs me the wrong way, but not this time. Also: the cover.

Oh, and how could I forget – we’ve now seen all of the the first two seasons of Game of Thrones. Damn is that some good TV. Devastatingly there’s no more until April 2013! Sadface.

Other things I’m enjoying: