I spent the last couple of weeks working on the first draft of Book 9 of my new series. For those who haven't clocked mention of it in my previous blogs, this is the series I am hoping to release once I have finished publishing "The Saga of Larten Crepsley". I've been beavering away at it for the past three years. It's been shrouded in secrecy so far, the main reason being that I haven't wanted to talk about it until I knew for sure that I'd be able to make it work. That's not unusual for me, by the way -- I'd put in three years of work on "The Saga" before I talked in public about my plans for it, and it was the same situation with "The Demonata". I like to keep fans involved with my wortking routines via my blogs and tweets, so that they can see that I'm not just sitting around with my feet up, doing nothing!! But I don't like to talk about plots and specifics until everything is lined up and ready to go.

What I CAN say about the series is that I think it's going well, and I also think I'm drawing close to the end. At the moment it's looking like it might run to 11 books -- although that depends on where the tenth leads me when I sit down to write it in a few months' time. If all goes well, I hope to wrap up work on all the first drafts of the series over the summer. There will still be lots of re-writing and editing to get through, and publishing deals will need to be struck before I can reveal any telling details in a public arena -- but there's light at the end of the tunnel!!! With luck, if it all runs smoothly, I'm hoping to make a big announcement about it later this year -- although I can't make any guarantees, and it's not unfeasible that it might be 2012 before I can talk freely about it, depending on a variety of factors.

If that all sounds like it's real cloak-and-dagger stuff... well, in a way it is! The writing process is a lengthy, complicated business, with all sorts of levels that you have to negotiate your way through before you can come to the nice part of actually releasing your book. There's a lot of behind-the-scenes huffing and puffing which every writer has to get through before they can talk in public about what they're working on -- planning the book (or series, as it is in my case), writing a first draft, re-writing, editing, sorting out a deal with a publisher. There are two different time zones for every writer -- "real time" and "writing time". In "real time" the first book of this series will arrive hot on the scene one day in the near future (hopefully not too long after the end of the Mr Crepsley series) and it will seem to fans that it's the work of just a few months. In my own "writing time" I'll have been working on the series for at least 4 years by that point, probably a good bit longer. Like a good magician's trick, writing might look easy and effortless, but there's a huge amount of hard graft and time involved to get to that swift and snappy "Tah-Dah!"" moment!!!!!!