It's been a busy old week for me on the writing front, which has been nice after so long away from my PC! First priority has been editing the books that I've already written in what will hopefully be my next long series. I've actually written first draft of 7 books already (!!!!) as long-term readers of my blog will know from preivous entries. I'm halfway through editing the fourth -- the books are quite short, as I've said before, each a bit shorter than any of the "Vampire Mountain" trilogy books, and my plan (which I'm hoping my publishers will go for) is to release them quite swiftly, one after another, in a steady stream. That being the case, I need to write all of them before we can move forward. I don't want to put myself under pressure, where I have to compromise the quality in order to meet a deadline. With my vampire and demon books, that was never a problem -- I was able to work on the the later books as the first few were coming out, because of the time lapse in publishing them. This time that's not an option, which is why I'm having to be so secretive about the project!

What's niggling at me more than the secrecy at the moment, however, is what to do when The Saga Of Larten Crepsley ends. The last Mr C book comes out in May 2012. I don't think the new series will be ready to launch later that year -- I might be wrong, but my gut tells me that I'm probably more realistically looking at a 2013 start for these babies -- maybe even later than that. So I can either take a publishing break for a bit, or else release one or more stand-alone books. Now, I do actually have finished working drafts of a few one-off books from years ago, which I've been sitting on for a rainy day. This might well be the time to dust them off, do some more work on them, and see how they look. Then again, maybe a break would be nice!!! No point asking you guys -- I know how you would all vote!!!!! Decisions, decisions!! Oh well, there's no rush and no panic. I'll forge ahead with the edits that I'm currently doing, hopefully write a frist draft of book 8 (and maybe book 9) over the coming weeks, then take things from there.

As well as all the editing, I typed up my speech from the NCTE/ALAN event in Florida last November, when I addressed several hundreds teachers and librarians and spoke about helping teenagers find themselves with my books. It's due to be published in ALAN's journal later in the year. I also answered several questions to be included in the trade paperback release of Hell's Horizon in the USA later this year. Plus I've added lots of new reviews to my site, mostly of Hell's Horizon, but a few of other books of mine too -- you can check them all out here: http://www.darrenshan.com/reviews/  As well as all that, I've been formulating my tour plans for the UK/Ireland and Australia later this year -- there will be more info about those in upcoming issues of the Shanville Monthly. And tonight I started going through the large stack of fan mail which has been awaiting me since long before Christmas!! Busy busy -- I don't know where I find the tie to sleep!!!!!!