News from the North

Hey, whaddaya know - I'm on the front page of cbc.ca with my 10 Tips for Travel to Exotic Countries . Even got a nice email from Medecins sans Frontieres thanking me for the plug. Meanwhile, Beasts of New York got Whatevered . I may be going to San Diego's in/famous ComicCon this weekend. Then again I may not be. Oh, the suspense.

But this blog isn't all about me. No, really, it isn't. Take this post, for instance. I have a few friends with books coming out in the next few months, and I want to tell you all about them: Cathy Wong , who is a naturopathic doctor, nutritionist, and About.com's Alternative Medicine guide, just published her first book, The Inside-Out Diet . If you're like me, you're suspicious of all diet/health-food books, but I can assure you from personal experience, Cathy's terrific, knowledgeable and thoughtful, she champions health and loves food at the same time. Go buy it. Jo Walton's Farthing comes out in paperback, in August, and its sequel Ha'Penny in early October. These books should really need no introduction - I've lost count of how many awards Farthing has been nominated for. And rightfully so. It's brilliant. And terrifying. And oh so relevant despite being sit in an alternate-history 1949. Go buy them. Speaking of sequels, Sarah Langan...

This - according to Google Translator - is a review of The Blood Price , which was just published in Germany (and in German): Well investigated travel thriller with Action Jon Evans second book with his hero Paul Wood is exactly the same dragging along like its Erstling “deadly path”. Paul was there still as a baking packman in Nepal on the way, he describes this time the Bosnia drawn by the civil war, drives with us to Albania, into the Karibik and to COUNT down on the famous artist celebration “Burning one” into Arizona. Evans urgently describes the situation in ex Yugoslavia and the tensions, which are still present under the ethnical groups there. Even if sometimes the action hooks somewhat, one marks to it that he argues much with his topics (usually even locally) and authentically reported on it. Naturally there is also this book a actionreichen Showdown to hope in which Paul and its friends the thing into the hand rather takes, instead of for the police. Who does not know thus i...

OK - I have gone ahead and launched the online serialization of my "children's book for adults" Beasts of New York . I'll be posting a chapter a day for the next 2-3 months, until the whole book is online. It's a fun read, I promise.

My fine UK publishers, Hodder & Stoughton , have given the official thumbs-up to my fourth novel, The Night of Knives , aka "the Africa book." And there was much rejoicing. What's more, I just handed in a draft of my graphic novel The Executor to my editor at Vertigo Comics . And now that I'm done writin' I can start readin' again. (Curiously, I don't read much while I'm writing.) Just finished Kirino's Out , which is brilliant but bleak. Yesterday I purchased from Amazon, in no particular order: A Few Short Notes About Tropical Butterflies by John Murray, The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross, Air by Geoff Ryman, Carnival by Elizabeth Bear, The Devil of Nanking by Mo Hayder, House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski, and Links by Nuruddin Farah. And I want to finally read I Am Legend by Richard Matheson before the movie comes out, but Amazon had no cheap paperback version available, so I'll check local bookstores. Oh, and I have an in...

So Invisible Armies was reviewed by Kirkus Reviews about six weeks ago. I figured the absence of a congratulatory note from my publisher meant it was a negative review (Kirkus is famous for being cranky), and anyways it would pop up on the bn.com page soon enough anyway. Well, said review has resolutely failed to appear, so today I went hunting around for a free online source for Kirkus Reviews, because I wasn't about to pay them forty bucks to read one (presumably negative) review. O fellow writers, please note, to my and perhaps your amazement, such a source actually does exist: NoveList . (Just ues their search form.) Anyway, to my further amazement, it's actually quite a nice review: Cyber-spacey thriller about good-guy hackers vs. bad-guy hackers, the fate of the planet hanging on every click ... Evans is clearly at home among the exuberant, idiosyncratic Cyberniks, and — occasional dollops of melodrama aside — he makes their world fresh and entertaining . (I'm not go...