I’ve just signed a deal to publish a new novel in 2009. This will be alongside the final volume of Kingdom of the Serpent. More soon.

Another great review of the Solaris Book of New Fantasy and my short story here.

A few weeks back I wrote how our increasingly rational society was behind the growth of fantasy as people sought out their irrationality fix. Some people wrote to decry any idea that we were getting more rational, citing everything from medievalist religious views to the growth of New Age-ism.

But when the Society for Psychical Research starts to get worried, you know you’re on pretty firm ground. According to the SPR’s Tony Cornell, reports of ghost sightings have declined from two a week to none at all in just a few years. The SPR bizarrely blames it on the rise of mobile phone usage - read the article, I’m not going to begin to explain the ’science’.

But the interesting thing is, the number of ghost sightings has remained pretty constant for centuries, according to Cornell. And now…nothing.

The first review of my short story Who Slays the Gyant, Wounds the Beast from the Solaris Book of New Fantasy is here.

You may recall the story stars Elizabethan England’s greatest spy Will Swyfte from Jack of Ravens. There’s actually been quite a lot of interest in my swashbuckling hero. More soon, possibly…

If you’re not all bored at the possibility that a genius like Da Vinci makes his work operate on numerous levels, read this.

Every country gets the fantasy it needs, it seems, whether that’s elves and wizards in the UK, US and Australia, or fantasy more rooted in the real world in Germany and Greece. I always thought fantasy was pretty much a universal genre, with many of its tropes based in ancient story-forms.

But a correspondent, Julian Wilson, pointed me in the direction of the Uncertainty Avoidance Index used in cross-cultural communications theory to map a society’s tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity.

The index indicates how much a society tolerates the new, the unknown and the different. Germany, which has a relatively high uncertainty avoidance index, is a society which relies on rules and regulations and tries to reduce its risks to the minimum. The US and particularly the UK have relatively low scores on the index.

In Cultures and Organisations: Software of the Mind, Geert Hofstede says, “Marieke de Mooij has pointed out that cultural values can be recognized in both the subjects and style of literary fiction produced in a country. As examples of world literature from high-UAI (Uncertainty Avoidance Index) countries, she mentions Franz Kafka’s The Castle from Czechia and Goethe’s Faust from Germany. In the former the main character is haunted by impersonal rules; in the latter the hero sells his soul for knowledge of Truth. Low-UAI Britain has produced literature in which the most unreal things happen: Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series.”

Later in the book he suggests that countries which have low uncertainty avoidance are more likely to have “literature dealing with fantasy worlds” and those with high uncertainty avoidance are more likely to have “literature dealing with rules and truth”.

So if you live in Greece, Portugal or Guatemala (high UAI) or Denmark, Jamaica and Singapore (low UAI), let me know if this is just another example of Academics Gone Mad or if it has some bearing on the tastes of fantasy readers around the world?

“It’s mad. It’s a horrible job. It doesn’t pay well. It’s lonely. It’s depression-inducing. It’s frustrating. There’s no fun to be had. But everyone has a drive to be a writer. And everyone thinks they can do it.

“Whereas to be one is some sort of mental derangement. They’re all bonkers. When my writers say they could earn more money at the till at Sainsbury’s, I say, well go and do it. There’s no point writing unless you feel that you have to do it. You have to really want to do it and to be prepared to suffer to do it. Or you really might as well go and work on the till at Sainsbury.”

Alexandra Pringle, Editor-in-Chief, Bloomsbury

I love Loch Ness. I’ve spent many a day along the banks, particularly when I was researching Darkest Hour. But I’ve never seen anything like this.

This is the first in an occasional series of things that inspired me while creating a book. Any story is more than just a collection of words, and the pieces that go into the original making can be diverse and many - a fragment of conversation, a song heard on the radio late at night, an image viewed briefly from a train window… All those have been part of the strange and sometimes incomprehensible process of imagining that eventually results in one of my tales, long or short.

Many of these inspirations are not apparent in the finished product. Some are more overt, and in occasional cases designed as such to create resonances, for instance Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now and the long, difficult boat trip in the Far Lands in The Queen of Sinister.

A lot of influences went into the bubbling cauldron for my next book The Burning Man, but one of the most powerful was Songs from the Victorious City, a mysterious and evocative blend of Middle Eastern sounds and westernised constructions by Anne Dudley and former Killing Joke frontman Jaz Coleman. It’s a fantastically powerful musical poem about Cairo, and was an effective backdrop while I was writing a long sequence set in that city, even with the odd scratch and sizzle of my old vinyl version.

Worth a listen.